Easy Death: Spiritual Wisdom on the Ultimate Transcending of Death and Everything Else

By Avatar Adi Da Samraj and Richard Grossinger

The prospect of death requires more than messages that console us or philosophies that immunize us from its actual implications. Whether you are approaching your own death, facing the death of a loved-one, or are simply wanting to understand the purpose of this brief and mortal life, you will find unique and transformative help in these pages. Easy Death—described by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross as a "masterpiece"—offers real wisdom from one who is not only profoundly sensitized to the mortal condition, but whose divinely enlightened view is rooted in the deathless Reality.

This third edition includes Avatar Adi Da's instruction on the real nature and actual process of death, and on realization of the deathless condition; accounts of the death experiences and events in Avatar Adi Da's own life; stories of Avatar Adi Da's spiritual help in the death transitions of devotees and their loved-ones; practical instruction on preparing for death, helping a loved-one die, and helping an animal die.

Adi Da Samraj was born in and as and from the "Bright" Reality in which there is neither birth nor death. His entire lifetime was spent unlocking that ultimate condition from limited views and offering a way for anyone to realize it directly. Therefore, Easy Death is not only about dying, or about preparing to die—it is a call to Awaken beyond all philosophies and practices related to dying, beyond even the very fact of suffering and death."

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781570973888

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The Ruchira Avatar,

Adi Da Samraj

Title

NOTE TO THE READER

All who study the Way of Adidam or take up its practice should remember that they are responding to a Call to become responsible for themselves. They should understand that they, not Avatar Adi Da Samraj or others, are responsible for any decision they make or action they take in the course of their lives of study or practice.

The devotional, Spiritual, functional, practical, relational, and cultural practices and disciplines referred to in this book are appropriate and natural practices that are voluntarily and progressively adopted by members of the practicing congregations of Adidam (as appropriate to the personal circumstance of each individual). Although anyone may find these practices useful and beneficial, they are not presented as advice or recommendations to the general reader or to anyone who is not a member of one of the practicing congregations of Adidam. And nothing in this book is intended as a diagnosis, prescription, or recommended treatment or cure for any specific problem, whether medical, emotional, psychological, social, or Spiritual. One should apply a particular program of treatment, prevention, cure, or general health only in consultation with a licensed physician or other qualified professional.

Easy Death is formally authorized for publication by the Ruchira Sannyasin Order of Adidam Ruchiradam. (The Ruchira Sannyasin Order of Adidam Ruchiradam is the senior cultural authority within the formal gathering of formally acknowledged devotees of Ruchira Avatar Adi Da Samraj.)

NOTE TO BIBLIOGRAPHERS: The correct form for citing Ruchira Avatar Adi Da Samraj’s Name (in any form of alphabetized listing) is: Adi Da Samraj

Copyright © 2021 The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd,

as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.

All rights reserved.

First ebook edition, 2021 (text matches 2005 print edition).

No part of this book may be copied or reproduced in any manner

without written permission from the publisher.

(The Dawn Horse Press, 12040 North Seigler Springs Road, Middletown, California 95461, USA)

The writings and discourses of Avatar Adi Da Samraj are the sacred scriptures of Adidam (the unique Spiritual Way Revealed and Given by Adi Da). In addition, His likeness and His artistic works are sacred images within the tradition of Adidam. As the principal Adidam organization to which Avatar Adi Da gave responsibility for protecting His sacred scriptures and sacred images, the Avataric Samrajya of Adidam calls for Avatar Adi Da’s writings, discourses, artistic works, and likeness to be honored and respected for all future time as Agents of His direct Spiritual Communication. It is Avatar Adi Da’s ever-living Intent in regard to this work that it not be reproduced or modified without consulting the Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.

ADIDAM and THE DAWN HORSE PRESS are trademarks of

The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.

Produced by The Dawn Horse Press, a division of

The Divine Avataric Holy Institution of Global Adidam Ruchiradam.

ebook ISBN: 1-57097-388-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2005928817

CONTENTS

About the Cover

FOREWORD

by Richard Grossinger

EDITORS’ PREFACE to the Third Edition

INTRODUCTION

The Living Divine Person Is Here to Help Everyone Realize the Deathless Condition

by Megan Anderson

PROLOGUE

The Heart of Understanding

from The Knee Of Listening

PART I

Death and the Ultimate Identity

The True Condition of Human Life

1. The Lesson of Bootsie’s Passing

Avatar Adi Da’s Childhood Contemplation of Death

2. The Truth About Death

3. Death Is Not Your Concern

4. There Is No Individual self That Dies

5. Human Experience and the Universal Unity

6. Easy Death

7. Death Is the Way to Life

8. Death and Joy

9. Feel Me Infinitely Above and Shoot Straight to Me Like an Arrow

The Story of Lance Barham’s Blessed Death by Deborah Fremont-Smith

PART II

Going Beyond Fear

Death, Sleep, and the Impulse of the Heart

1. The Love-Blissful, Unthreatened Current of the Bright

Avatar Adi Da’s Early Demonstration of ego-Death

2. The Body Wants to Allow Death

3. Death, Sleep, and Meditation

4. Get Up from Bed and Drop Dead!

5. The Inherently Fearless Condition

6. Be Fearless!

A Story of Avatar Adi Da’s Great Blessing-Work with Tamara McPhail

by John Bent

7. What Is More Than Wonderful Is Not Threatened

8. The Problem of Death

from The Dawn Horse Testament Of The Ruchira Avatar

9. Every Being Is Moved to This Immense Peacefulness

PART III

The Mystery of Life Beyond Death

After-Death States and the Cosmic Mandala

1. Stay on the Zero

2. After Death, Mind Makes You

3. Let Death Make You Serious About Life

4. The Supreme Healer

by Frans Bakker and Tom Closser

5. The Cosmic Mandala

6. The Penetration of the Cosmic Mandala

7. The Divine Brightness

from The Dawn Horse Testament Of The Ruchira Avatar

PART IV

The Paradox of Reincarnation

Rebirth and the Deeper Personality

1. Death Is a Radical Fast

2. The Paradox of Reincarnation

3. The Mystery of a Human Birth

4. The Death of a Fascination

by James Steinberg

5. The Gross Personality, the Deeper Personality, and the Ultimate Identity

6. There Is No Entity That Passes from Lifetime to Lifetime

from The Dawn Horse Testament Of The Ruchira Avatar

7. Divine Descent

Avatar Adi Da’s Avataric Divine Self-Emergence and the Dissolution of the Karmic Vehicles of His Incarnation

PART V

You Will Treat One Another Differently in Death

Serving the Death Process

1. How to Serve the Dying Person

2. Always Serve the Process of Release

Letting Go of My Brother

by Ron Jensen

3. Death Is a Living Process

4. Death Is a Ceremony for All

5. Death Is an Entirely Different Event Than You Think It to Be

6. Send Him My Love and Blessings

The Death Transition of Bernie Kelly

by Angelo Druda

7. She Is With Me

The Illness and Transition of Cathy Lewis, as told by her intimates and friends

8. As You Approach Death

PART VI

The Celebration of Passing

Grief, Mourning, and the Process of Release

1. Death Is a Perfect Insult

2. Transcending the Ritual of Sorrow

3. The Celebration of Passing

4. The Death of Derek, the Birth of Grace

A Story of Love, Loss, Surrender, and Divine Help

by Richard and Lynn Goodman

5. The Understanding That Overcomes Suffering

6. Realization Is the Only Liberation from Loss

PART VII

Death and the Purpose of Existence

Realization of the Deathless Reality

1. Use Your Life

2. Your Practice Will Not Be Lost at Death

3. This Liberating Impulse

4. The Significance of Renunciation

5. Death Is Not the End of Anything

6. Be Full of the Light

A Story of Avatar Adi Da’s Blessing of My Sister

by Carolyn Lee

7. Death and Light

Avatar Adi Da’s Perfect Demonstration of the Entire Process of Illumined Death and the Unique Gift of His Bodily Continuation

8. The Great Event of Divine Translation

from The Dawn Horse Testament Of The Ruchira Avatar

9. My Sphere of Love-Bliss

EPILOGUE

Death Is a Freedom-Ritual of Self-Sacrifice

from The Mummery Book

APPENDIX A

Serving the Death Transition: A Summary of Avatar Adi Da’s Instructions

by Connie Mantas and Judy Wendling

APPENDIX B

Recommended Recitations for Serving the Dying Individual

APPENDIX C

Serving Animals Through the Dying Process

by Stuart Camps, Director of Fear-No-More Zoo of Adidam

Become a Formal Devotee of Avatar Adi Da

Notes to the Text of Easy Death

Glossary

ABOUT THE COVER

Throughout His Life, Avatar Adi Da Samraj has been intensely focused in developing both literary and artistic means of communicating the True Nature of Reality. He approaches the creation of His literary and artistic works as a process of Revealing What Reality Is and how Its True Nature can be Realized.

For the cover of Easy Death, Avatar Adi Da has chosen an image He created in 1999 (1999_111_04). This image conveys His message that death is an utterly acceptable aspect of existence—that death has not modified the fragility of flowers.

Examples of the artwork of Adi Da Samraj, together with discussions of His artwork and His own statements about it, may be seen online at:

www.daplastique.com

THE COMPANIONS OF THE TRUE DAWN HORSE

Course Nine

The Avataric Divine Wisdom-Teaching of Adi Da Samraj is grouped into twenty-three Streams, or Courses—each of which conveys a particular aspect of His Teaching-Revelation.

Seventeen of the twenty-three Courses are grouped together as The Companions Of The True Dawn Horse. Easy Death belongs to Course Nine of The Companions Of The True Dawn Horse. That Course covers Avatar Adi Da’s Teaching on mental, emotional, sexual, and whole bodily health and Enlightenment. And that Course includes the following Source-Texts:

Ruchira Tantra Yoga: The Physical-Spiritual (and Truly Religious) Method Of Mental, Emotional, Sexual, and Whole Bodily Health and Enlightenment In The Divine Way Of Adidam

Easy Death: Spiritual Wisdom on the Ultimate Transcending of Death and Everything Else

Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun: The Universal ego-Transcending Principle of Love Applied to Exercise and the Method of Common Physical Action—A Science of Whole Bodily Wisdom, or True Emotion, Intended Most Especially for Those Engaged in Religious (and, in Due Course, Spiritual) Life

The Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace: The Universal ego-Transcending Principle of Love Applied to Diet and the Regenerative Discipline of True Health

For a listing of the twenty-three Courses of Avatar Adi Da’s Wisdom-Teaching, please see The Avataric Divine Wisdom-Teaching of Adi Da Samraj.

FOREWORD

by Richard Grossinger

author, Planet Medicine and Embryogenesis

Since I began reading spiritual literature at the age of nineteen, . . . no book has changed my view of the universe more profoundly than Easy Death. Adi Da Samraj has spoken directly to the heart of our human situation—the shocking reality of our brief and unbidden lives. Through his words I have experienced a glimmering of eternal life and view my own existence as timeless and spaceless in a way that I never did before.

We live under the shadow of death; we cannot evade it; we cannot minimize it. Science, politics, and the modern media all try to propagandize us into seeking absolute fulfillment on this plane, but any happiness achieved on that basis will be superficial and transient. We exist in preparation for an extraordinary experience that everyone has undergone, even the ordinary aunts and uncles we view in old photographs: They have been zapped out of this experience.* They have gone on this mysterious journey, no matter what and how they lived. And we will follow them, each and every one of us.

Yet Adi Da Samraj is extraordinarily thorough in his criticism of false assurances—things we tell ourselves that will make no difference in the end. The actual experience of death will overwhelm any planning, any memory. The cosmic shock of death will not suddenly enlighten us and make it possible for us to transcend. We should not rely on the inevitable improvement of our insights in a purgatory or heaven, or some vague guess of another chance after reincarnation. One may nurture the best of intentions for merging with higher planes, but under the actuality of the transition between lives, everyone will be returned inevitably to where they really are. The universe has no other way: You cannot even hold on to your philosophy or your mantra when you pass by a cross-legged nude on a couch! So what do you think happens from life to death and back to life again . . . in the midst of such a profound event as psycho-physical death?†

The answer lies in full joyful surrender before death. Adi Da Samraj’s easy death is a willing, conscious giving back of life. You surrender not because there is nothing left in the end and you are obliterated and extinguished anyway, but because there is nothing to keep and the law that has given you life in the beginning requires surrender at its end.

In this way, death becomes a necessary experience, a radical fast, Adi Da Samraj calls it, since it purifies us of our elemental aspect, our gross self. If we feel there is nothing other than this gross self, that does not reduce our reality; ideas can no more destroy than preserve whatever is our soul. Even if we feel we must be something more, that in itself does not create something more. Knowledge is never more than knowledge about—and knowledge about is confounded by death. There is no knowledge about things that is senior to death. Death is the transformation of the knower. . . . Death is a process in which the knower is transformed, and all previous or conditional knowing is scrambled or confounded. . . . To ‘consider’ death is fruitless, since the knower is what is changed by death.‡

Part of Adi Da Samraj’s comprehensive teaching on death is a description of the process of moving through the subtler aspects of the brain and nervous system into the source of mind and phenomena through the mechanics of attention. His teachings are an unmythologized expression of the wisdom that may also be found in ancient guidebooks such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He depicts the vision of the Divine Brightness in star-form and of the surrounding Cosmic Mandala (a vision that may serve as a guide to the newly dead person), and he presents it from a variety of angles and perspectives.

It is precisely because our attention is so stubbornly attached that great Adepts humanly incarnate that transcendent Divine Brightness and attract human beings to meditate upon them, realize the inherent Divinity, and transcend all of these limiting mechanisms of egoic attention and energy. And the call to devotion to him as such a window to the Divine Reality is the essential message of Adi Da Samraj in his teachings, and of his devotees in their many remarkable testimonies, in Easy Death.

This book is a remarkable revelation of the understanding that death is simply another experience in life. If one sees life clearly for what it is, then, as he points out, death will not represent a major change at all; it will be simply a relocation, as from California to New Zealand. If life is surrendered before death, it will not have to be surrendered under duress at the time of death.

I would caution the reader against assuming that what you will find here is in any way consoling assurances. Here is a matter of life and death, presented with searing absoluteness, with the only alternative requiring supreme self-sacrifice both while we are alive and when we die.

Specifically, Adi Da Samraj warns us against taking too seriously the spiritual literature on life after death. After all, he points out, people brought back to life from near death give egoic interpretations of these states in order to reassure themselves that they are going to a peaceful and shining place and will be among loved ones. He offers no such consolations.

In a dream we are surrounded by people who are aspects of our own psyche. If we are told by one of them that we are dreaming, we may hear it, but it is part of the chatter of the dream and does not alter our dreaming. During waking life we are also aspects of a dream, but it is the dream of the Radiant Conscious Being. In the dream of this Being we are all the same person. And so, in this book Adi Da Samraj tells us, in essence, When you Awaken, you will Awaken to and as the very same Being that I Am.

EDITORS’ PREFACE

to the Third Edition

In 1983, the first edition of Easy Death appeared to wide acclaim. Many people in the professions associated with death and dying expressed their immense appreciation, and the book was hailed by death-and-dying pioneer Elisabeth Kübler-Ross as a masterpiece. The second edition of the book was published in 1991, bringing together more of Avatar Adi Da’s remarkable Wisdom about death given in the years since the first edition. As Adi Da Samraj essentially retired from active verbal Instruction in April 2000, this third edition of Easy Death stands as a summary communication of His Teaching on matters of life and death.

The contents of this edition draw from both previous editions, from new Talks and Writings, and from the remarkable stories of Avatar Adi Da’s Spiritual Work with the living and the dying that has continued without cease since the second edition. The volume also contains several excerpts from Avatar Adi Da’s principal Source-Text, The Dawn Horse Testament Of The Ruchira Avatar, on the question of death. And perhaps the most significant additions to the third edition are the sections describing Avatar Adi Da’s own direct consideration and experience relative to the esoteric process of death and Realization.

If you are open to the Blessing that flows through the pages of Easy Death, you will find yourself drawn into a heart-conversation as alive and intimate as any secret exchange between Guru and disciple in ancient times.

Adi Da Samraj

Lopez Island, 2000

INTRODUCTION

The Living Divine Person Is Here to Help Everyone Realize the Deathless Condition

by Megan Anderson

Senior Editor, The Dawn Horse Press

Death is a universal obligation. It does not matter what sex, race, or religion we are. It does not matter how much money we have. It does not matter what we have accomplished in our lives. Death is the inevitable debt we incur the moment we are born. It can bankrupt the entire accumulation of our experience at any time.

These plain facts—and apparent problem—of mortality have always been an essential component of Avatar Adi Da’s lifelong consideration and His address to humanity. In the face of the tsunami disaster of December 26, 2004, Adi Da Samraj expressed His profoundly compassionate regard for the residents and tourists on the beaches of Southeast Asia for whom death arrived on the crest of a giant wave. There was no warning, no time for conscious preparation—birth’s balance was due on the spot. It was a stark human tragedy of ending on a mass scale.

Given the universal nature of death and its tremendous impact on our world, you might think that the process of death would be of fundamental interest to each of us, every day. You might think that death would be a reality for which we would want to account from the start—to know it, to understand it, to address it head on. However, Adi Da Samraj has pointed out that most of us—especially in the modern West, and everywhere that consumer culture is proliferating—prefer to ignore death if at all possible. When we are not busy living as if death were not going to happen, we create philosophies that make us feel better about death. Though philosophical and religious beliefs offer consolations to the mind, they do not eliminate the suffering of our mortality or give us definitive knowledge of what happens after death.

Adi Da Samraj does not offer reassuring promises of a beautiful future for all via mere belief in His Revelation. Neither does He idealize what can be achieved or experienced in a human lifetime. Throughout His Life, Avatar Adi Da has never been satisfied with the stock answers to death—neither the exoteric promises of religious hope, nor the esoteric efforts of Spiritual escape, nor the bleak dogma that when you’re dead, you’re dead.

Adi Da Samraj was born in and as and from the Bright Reality in which there is neither birth nor death. Thus, His devotees know Him to be the Divine Avatar—One Who has manifested in the human world by crossing down from the Deathless Condition. Even as a child, He knew that Truth inherently transcends the pain of loss and ending. And His entire Lifetime has been spent unlocking that Ultimate Condition from limited views and offering a way for anyone to Realize It directly—free of myth, belief, or strategy.

Speaking to a group of His devotees in late 2004, Adi Da Samraj directly Communicated the heart’s need for an answer to the question of death:

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: There is Truth—but you have to deal with death. If it does not touch death, then it has nothing to do with Truth. Truth has to deal with death now—because now is a potential moment of death. A consoling belief that requires death to be some other time is not good enough religion. Religion must apply in the moment, and it must deal with death, must be sufficient to be greater than death—far greater. It must be Light, rather than darkness—and it must be so now.

Most Perfect Realization necessarily covers everything, and covers everything right now. If this is the moment of death, Realization has to be sufficient to deal with it. Until the process gets to that point, the Realization is not enough.

—December 21, 2004

Easy Death, then, is not just about dying, nor even about preparing to die—though there is tremendous wisdom on those subjects between its covers. It is principally a communication of Avatar Adi Da’s Offering of the Divine Realization of Reality that Outshines everything. He Calls us to an Awakening that is beyond all possible philosophies and practices related to dying, beyond even the very fact of suffering and death.

Traditional Approaches to Death and the Dual Sensitivity That Transcends Them

For historians, anthropologists, and other scholars, burial practices are one of the most illuminating windows into human cultures. From the spirit-traps of ancient Jericho, to Egyptian mummies and tombs, to cremation, to exposure, to embalming—human beings have always attributed such significance to the passage of death that they accommodated it in accordance with their ultimate beliefs about the world and the greater powers that affect us.

One of the tremendous accomplishments of Avatar Adi Da’s Life and Work is His description of a comprehensive schema that accounts for all the beliefs and approaches to the human situation proposed since the earliest times. His key Revelation is that all human endeavor (whether practical, religious, or Spiritual) is based in identification with the point of view of a specific part of the human structure (body, mind, psyche, root-self-essence, and so on). As He indicates, the point of view that is characteristic of an individual or a culture will determine the prevailing beliefs about death and the afterlife. There are two overarching categories of the human approach to death that help us understand the unique vantage of Avatar Adi Da’s Wisdom.

The first approach is to idealize and/or attempt to eternalize—whether in this realm or in a similar world—individual human existence. This orientation is most characteristic of the religious traditions that have grown out of the West—principally, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—but the same orientation is also reflected in the beliefs of many cultures throughout the world. Accommodation is made for the anticipated resurrection (or continued individual survival) of the person in specific terms—for example, through preservation of the bodily remains, or otherwise as an individual soul in a heavenly realm. Good works in life are intended to gain the favor of a Deity (or a plurality of deities) that monitors behavior according to Divinely prescribed rules. The Great Power (however conceived) is fundamentally understood to be related to human existence as original creator of life and ultimate judge at death.

In His essay entitled The Dual Sensitivity at the Origin of The Divine Way Of Adidam, Adi Da Samraj summarizes this first orientation:

Much of religious dogma invents a future, in this world or after death, wherein all the kinds of things you hope to obtain by struggle in this life are eternalized. Some like to philosophize about this world, saying that some great event (or even Man-made result or effect) is going to happen that will utopianize (or otherwise perfect and eternalize) life in this world. Some like to believe that everyone is going to be physically resurrected after death, such that life in this world will continue forever. Others like to fantasize a future beyond this world, in which exactly the same thing happens—the eternalization of the self-fulfillment one has sought in this life.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj

The Only Complete Way To Realize

The Unbroken Light Of Real God

The following quotations from the King James Bible express the Western religious views of God as the ultimate arbiter of life and death, and of the goal of eternalization of life for those who live righteously:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. [John 5:24]

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. [Rom. 6:23]

But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead. [2Cor. 1:9]

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. [Rev. 21:4]

The following quotations are from the Qur’an on the same subject:

Every soul will taste death and you will be paid in full only on the Day of Resurrection. Whoever is kept away from the Fire and admitted to the Garden will have triumphed. The present world is only an illusory pleasure. [The Family of Imran (3).185]

[I]t is He who gives life and death; the alternation of night and day depends on Him; will you not use your minds? [The Believers (23).80]

Look, then, at the imprints of God’s mercy, how He restores the earth to life after death: this same God is the one who will return people to life after death—He has power over all things. [The Byzantines (30).50]

[From The Qur’an: A New Translation, by M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford University Press, 2004).]

The second human approach to death is to escape from the patterns of suffering evident in human existence. This attitude is most typical of Eastern cultures, exemplified by the cyclic views of rebirth in Hinduism and Buddhism, but also is shown in other mystically oriented cultures around the world. A particular human life is seen as but a speck on an endless ocean of possibilities. And a right life is one that gains merit to provide more auspicious births in the future. The most intensive practitioners of such religions desire to escape bondage to this perpetual and helpless sequence through devotional and mystical union with the Divine, asceticism, and/or extreme inversion away from what is perceived as the illusory world. These traditions are more apt to purify or eliminate the body after death—via fire or exposure—than to memorialize bodily remains.

. . . People are more realistic in the traditional East. In the traditional East, people do not forget to tell one another that this world is mortality-land, and not paradise. Therefore, the traditional wisdom-Message in the East is that True Happiness is to be attained by seeking for That Which Is Eternal, and, therefore, by strategically renouncing every kind of arrangement with what is merely temporary.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj

The Only Complete Way To Realize

The Unbroken Light Of Real God

The Advaitin Sage Ramana Maharshi describes the Eastern (Hindu) view of death and rebirth, and the impulse to break this cycle:

After the death of the physical body, the mind remains inactive for some time, as in dreamless sleep, when it remains worldless and therefore bodiless. But soon it becomes active again in a new world and a new body—the astral—till it assumes another body in what is called a rebirth. But the Jnani, the Self-Realized man, whose mind has already ceased to act, remains unaffected by death: it has dropped never to rise again to cause births and deaths. The chain of illusions has snapped for ever for him.

[Ramana Maharshi, quoted in S. S. Cohen, Guru Ramana: Memories and Notes (Tiruvannamalai, India: Sri Ramanasramam, 1980), 40.]

The following quotes from a Tibetan Buddhist text indicate the contemplation of the reality of death, and from that contemplation the impulse to be free of all suffering:

The whole point of death meditation is to urge you into the practice of Dharma, into the consideration of karma and the law of cause and effect and how you can do something to affect your future rebirths. Thus meditation should spur you on like a fighter being pushed into an arena. As Je-tzün Mi-la rä-pa said, I went to the mountains because I feared death. But now that I see the true Dharmakāya nature of my mind, even if death comes I have no fears.

Samsāra means to circle, in other words to revolve continually through the cycle of birth, sickness, old age, death, then rebirth, sickness and so forth. . . . Meditating on all [these] disadvantages of samsāra, you should develop renunciation or the state of mind that wishes to be completely free of all suffering. This is the Hinayāna motivation and with it an understanding of Voidness brings you Liberation.

[From the commentary, by Beru Khyentze Rinpoche, to The Mahamudra: Eliminating the Darkness of Ignorance, by the Ninth Karmapa, Wang-ch’ug dor-je, trans. by Alexander Berzin (Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1978), 23 and 29–30.]

While Adi Da Samraj confirms the notion that there is a process that continues after this present life, what He describes altogether is an ultimate Wisdom that includes and transcends both the Western and the Eastern approaches. For True Liberation, there must be both the full acknowledgement of mortality and the recognition of the impulse to Perfect and Eternal Happiness.

I Say to you: Always remember that this world (and conditional existence altogether) is not paradise, that this is mortality-land, that every one and every thing passes, and that True Happiness is not about (and does not require) the perfecting or eternalizing of this condition (or of any condition at all), and that True Happiness is not (Itself) a matter of staying here, or clinging to here, or leaving here (or of going, or staying, or leaving any where at all).

I also Say to you: Always be devotionally responsive from the heart—and (thus) always remember that your inherent (and inherently great) heart-disposition wants and needs (and cannot—in any moment, or even now—be satisfied with anything less than) Infinite, Absolute, True, Eternal Happiness (or Most Perfect Divine Self-Realization).

I do not Speak exclusively, representing only one or the other of your halves (whether Eastern or Western). Rather, I Speak to your native (or inherent) dual sensitivity—your sensitivity to what is conditionally real and your sensitivity to What Is Un-conditionally Real.

—Avatar Adi Da Samraj

The Only Complete Way To Realize

The Unbroken Light Of Real God

Death and Dying Techniques Do Not Address the Self-Contraction

In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published her groundbreaking work, On Death and Dying. She challenged the increasingly antiseptic medical views that kept death out of sight, out of mind—and even out of direct discussion while it was occurring. She opened the doors for study of both the psychology of the dying and of the experience of death itself. A few years later, Raymond Moody published his Life After Life, coining the term near-death experience to describe commonalities discovered in research with individuals who were resuscitated after clinical death. These and other pioneers of the modern death and dying movement fostered consciousness about the inevitable end of our lives in a secularizing world that had all but medicalized the process of dying. Today there are hundreds of books available on death and dying, approaching the topic from nearly as many different angles.

Adi Da Samraj acknowledges that the popular approaches to death and dying have served greatly to improve compassionate service to others in hospitals and in terms of the possibility for in-home care. However, they, like other traditional Western approaches to dying, fall short of a transformative address to the real nature of death and to the impulse to Perfect Happiness. In early 1991, Avatar Adi Da spoke about the recommended methods for dying that are proposed in the growing literature:

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: The techniques recommended in popular death and dying literature these days are, in general, procedures that can be relaxing and consoling, but they do not have the ability to change your destiny after death. A presumption exists today that an individual can be enlightened or go to heaven on the basis of what he or she does during the death process. This is not true. A wide range of destinies are possible after death. A superior destiny, even to the degree of Divine Self-Realization, requires profound Spiritual practice throughout one’s lifetime, and even throughout many lifetimes. Death techniques will not change your destiny, although they may relax and console you.

There is no unique technique to use in the death process. You cannot go any further after death than your karma dictates or than your lifetime of Spiritual practice makes possible.

—April 9, 13, and 17, 1991

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross describes common elements of near-death experience:

[In a near-death experience] The ones we meet are the ones we have loved the most and who preceded us in death.

After we are met by those we have loved, and by our own guides and guardian angels, we are passing through a symbolic transition often described in the form of a tunnel, a river, a gate. Each one will choose what is most symbolically appropriate for him. . . .

After we pass through this visually very beautiful and individually appropriate form of transition, called the tunnel, we approach a source of light that many of our patients describe and that I have myself experienced in the form of an incredibly beautiful and unforgettable life-changing experience called Cosmic Consciousness.

In the presence of this light, which most people in our western hemisphere call Christ or God or Love or Light, we are surrounded by total and absolute, unconditional love, understanding and compassion. We are in the presence of this light, which is a source of pure spiritual energy and no longer physical or psychic energy. Spiritual energy can neither be manipulated nor used by human beings. It is an energy in the realm of existence where negativity is impossible.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D., Death Is of Vital Importance: On Life, Death and Life After Death, comp. and ed. by Goran Grip, M.D. (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1995), 93–94.

Avatar Adi Da has also addressed the notion that the Light—found rather universally in descriptions of near-death experiences—has significance relative to the state that an individual will permanently achieve after the death process has gone beyond the point of no return:

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: One of the popular techniques of the death and dying movement is the instruction to go into the Light. The instruction to look into the Light is a technique to relax people into the process of death and to help them to feel better while alive. There is already a psycho-physical tendency in the body-mind to have such an experience after death. However, even though this tendency exists, people do not remain in the Light. Their attention inevitably returns to conditional states.

Basically, the popular exercises are tidbits people take here and there from the reports of near-death experiences. On the basis of these reports, people create programs for death and techniques to help them feel more relaxed about dying. What actually occurs after death, however, they do not know—because the after-death experience is created by one’s karmic tendencies, and it is only affected by real Spiritual practice. Mind, or its absence, determines where you will go.

There is a tendency in the popular literature about death to think of the Light as an ultimate, heavenly realm. In fact, the light is more like a window in the midst of the field of perception. Going into the Light is a process of ascent corresponding to the process of Yogic ascent. It is not the ultimate process of sadhana. The ultimate process is not about ascent, descent, or merging into some Super-Object, such as the Light. The ultimate process is about Realizing the Perfectly Subjective Divine Self-Condition.

—April 9, 13, and 17, 1991

Instead of promising consolation through techniques, Adi Da Samraj constantly brings us back to our present understanding of death. Our reaction to the fact of death is active right now—whether or not we are aware of it consciously—in and as our presumption of identification with the body as a separate self. He calls this presumption the self-contraction, and much of His Teaching is devoted to a root-understanding of this constant act. As a result of this presumption of separateness, we inherently behave like people who are dying. Avatar Adi Da describes this activity in Part VI, in a play on Kübler-Ross’s famous stages of the death process:

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: All the people who are living—except for those who are fully Spiritually Awake or profoundly and truly religious—are actually dramatizing the psychology of people who are dying. Very simply put, this is exactly what people are doing. Refusing to be responsible, being oblivious in life, not wanting to deal with anything, sort of blasé—that is denial. Getting angry, reactive—this is the second stage of the process of dying. What is the search for this or that consolation? Bargaining, isn’t it? There are all kinds of seeking, bargaining. And depression is a characteristic mood of people, especially when there is nothing distracting them—no new possibility, no amusement, no consolation.

All this is the psychology of somebody who is dying, not somebody who is truly alive and oriented to the process of Realizing the Divine. Instead of being truly alive, you all have invested yourselves in the psychology of death—and you are denying the reality of death, angry about it, bargaining (or seeking), depressed, every now and then relaxed and accepting a little. But, then, when another impulse comes up—more denial, anger, bargaining. It is as if you are spending your life in a hospital, waiting to die from a terminal disease—which is the constriction you have placed on your own heart, your own energy, your own life, because you have devoted yourself to the self-contraction and all its results.

The self-contraction is a disease. You are dying from this reaction, this effort. This is why you are dying. The self-contraction ultimately kills you bodily. All the while you are alive, you are dramatizing this psychology, this process of moving to the point of death. Whatever the cause of your death, you have invested your entire life in this contraction and its results.

—The Understanding That Overcomes Suffering (Part VI)

What we are suffering, therefore, is more fundamental than the need for a particular technique while dying, or the promise of a brilliant future after death. As Adi Da Samraj says, Truth has to deal with death right now, or it is not enough. To do that, we have to address an illusion and an activity to which we are otherwise completely committed.

True Service to the Dying and Avatar Adi Da’s Unique Gift of ego-Death

Adi Da Samraj clearly indicates where we can go for true help. From the earliest days of His Teaching, He has always pointed to the great beings throughout history who stand above the rest in terms of their Realization of That Which is Greater than death. These are what Avatar Adi Da calls Adept-Realizers of varying degrees. In fact, such unique figures are at the heart of all the major Spiritual traditions of humankind.

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: People who are intolerant of Spiritual Masters, who think Gurus are what is wrong with a Spiritual Way of life, are the most misled of all. Where do they think they are going to get the Truth from? Books? The ego? Yourself? That is a very popular notion these days—It’s within you, and so forth.

No, it is not. The you reference is the problem, the very thing that must be transcended.

Spiritual Masters are the source of the Revelation of Truth in human history. It does not come from any other place. It does not fall out of the sky. It comes from Adept-Realizers.

—July 28, 2004

Such great beings are the true source of wisdom in the world—and, thus, it is they who can be of the greatest service to those who are dying. They do not merely perform rites based on beliefs about the afterlife, but have the power to literally transform the nature of our minds and bodies while alive, turning us to the Ultimate Reality, and thereby helping to generate a different destiny after death. For instance, it is a long-acknowledged tradition in Tibetan Buddhism (explicit in the famous Tibetan Book of the Dead) that, for an auspicious death, a lama must guide you in the death transition, through the various experiences that will arise.

Avatar Adi Da’s Graceful Help relative to the death process occurs not only through the Instruction He offers, but in terms of His direct Spiritual transformation of His devotee and His influence on what would otherwise be the devotee’s destiny at death. Easy Death is full of stories of Avatar Adi Da’s Blessing and Regard—easing the dying individual and Calling him or her to the Perfect Happiness that transcends death in every moment. In the relationship with Him as Divine Heart-Master, Avatar Adi Da’s devotees find a peace beyond the presumption of separate self—as expressed in this letter written by a devotee who was nearing the end of her life:

I thank You so much for all Your Blessings throughout this process of letting the body go. I am more and more able to accept my death and am, in fact, feeling quite liberated from the stupidity of the body-mind. I constantly remember Your Instruction to be fearless, and I have no doubt of Your Love, which is what truly moves me beyond all fear.

Also, Beloved, You often move me beyond the body-mind to a place of Bliss and Joyful Happiness. In that place also, the heart aches with a longing that never really ends.

—Be Fearless! (Part II)

Avatar Adi Da’s Help to His devotees, however, is about much more than merely Blessing them with His Regard at the time of their death transition. His Offering is the means to actually participate in a unique process of ego-transcendence—one that is free, from the outset, of the presumed limits of the mortal condition. That process is a not about blissful distractions from the reality of death, but a kind of volunteering of the suffering self in any moment, yielding in Communion with Him to the present Condition of Truth, prior to the self-contraction.

In a Talk entitled The Gorilla Sermon, Avatar Adi Da uses a potent metaphor to communicate something of how the relationship to Him generates this process. It is not through self-effort, or any techniques of somehow slaying the ego. The ego cannot be relinquished through its own endeavors. Instead, He describes a process of Awakening through attraction by the Divine Condition Revealed in the relationship with Him. In the excerpt below, He has been speaking about a dream in which a gorilla—the gorilla of fear and suffering and death—is chasing you down the beach:

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: Some of you were with Me this morning, looking at a book called Facing Death.¹ How absurd—the notion of facing death! The first thing you lose in death is face! . . . How can you face it? Everything you do to face it, everything you do to prevent the gorilla, has no ultimate effect on the gorilla. All seeking is simply your distraction, your makeup, your false face, your fascination. But—Zap!—the gorilla gets you every time. Everybody dies.