Adi Da and The Case of Ken Wilber 1

Over the years, the well-known author, Ken Wilber, has helped many spiritual seekers find their Spiritual Master, Adi Da Samraj, because of Wilber's extraordinarily strong endorsements of both Adi Da Samraj's Teaching and of Adi Da Himself. Wilber has acknowledged Adi Da Samraj as both the Divine Incarnate (see the above quote) and as one of his teachers [Grace and Grit], and much of his own conceptual framework can be viewed as borrowing from that of Adi Da Samraj. (As the Wikipedia article on the Integral Movement puts it: "Wilber, borrowing centrally from the writings of Adi Da, also built upon the ideas of previous integral thinkers like Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser in developing his own theory.") Here are just a few specific examples from Wilber's writings, and from others commenting on how Wilber derived from Adi Da:

So naturally, many people have wondered what it could mean when they heard that Wilber was no longer standing behind those endorsements unequivocally. The best answer to that question is to read Wilber's own writings about Adi Da Samraj. We have laid them out for you here in their entirety, along with only a little commentary, as the "flip flops" in the progression of his writings are largely self-explanatory.

To us, it seems hard to draw any conclusion other than this: Even though Wilber's own conceptual framework (and the career he based on writing about that framework) had benefitted greatly from the Teaching of Adi Da Samraj, he feared that his career would be ruined by the word getting out about his "love and devotion" to "the living Sat-Guru" (Wilber's own words), and by the "grief" he was receiving for his public confession of that devotion. He acted accordingly.

Of course, such a fear of being associated with a Spiritual Master is not surprising in these materialistic and anti-authoritarian times, when even genuine Spiritual Masters are automatically labelled "cult leaders". Indeed, one could say, perhaps it was even harder in the time of Jesus, when one risked not only career or friends but life itself, by being associated with a controversial Spiritual Master; this surely was what motivated Nicodemus to visit Jesus in secret, and led Peter to deny his own beloved Spiritual Master. Had Jesus been living now, rather than two thousand years ago, no doubt he would have been branded a "cult leader"; "scourged" for fraternizing with whores, suggesting revolutionary ideas, and the like; and "crucified" by lawsuits from ex-disciples whose expectations of Him differed from what the Man Himself was here to offer. Instead of Christianity, there would be references to a "Jesus cult", in much the same way Adi Da's detractors conjure an "Adi Da cult" into existence. As in Jesus' time, when the primary forces working to destroy Him were the fundamentalists of the established religion (e.g, the Pharisees), so too in our time, the "anti-cult movement" against new minority religions to a significant extent is funded and driven by the fundamentalist sects of the large, established Western religions. (Click here for just a few examples.) It is not unlike the way in which the corporate powers associated with traditional sources of energy (such as coal and oil) have often worked to impede the development of newer, alternative energy sources, for the sake of maintaining power and profit.

Not surprisingly, all of us who are Adi Da Samraj's devotees have experienced at times that kind of reaction against Adi Da Samraj and the new religion of Adidam. We have felt compelled to fight the prejudice against religious minorities represented by this reaction, amazingly still present in a time when so much progress has been made relative to other forms of prejudice (racism, sexism, etc.). But Ken Wilber appears not to have had the personal strength to continue advocating Adi Da Samraj in spite of the "grief" he was receiving. So for a while, he tried to have it both ways, publicly denouncing "Da", while privately confessing his "love and devotion" to "Master Adi Da", and privately expressing the hope that "my work will continue to bring students to the Way of the Heart". As a consequence (particularly after his private communications became public), Wilber's communications created a great amount of confusion. Some people were only aware of his intentionally public communications, and had forgotten (or had never seen) his earlier endorsements in their full detail, and had never seen his private communications.

And so Wilber's writing is one thing, the man, quite another.

To help sort matters out, we include here everything Wilber wrote about Adi Da Samraj (at least everything we know of), so that there can be no suggestion that anything has been taken out of context. Indeed, the fact that many of his readers only read his later writings about Adi Da Samraj without having also read precisely what he wrote earlier has allowed him the luxury of making suggestions about those earlier writings — for instance, that he was always for the teaching but not the teacher, or for the "Spiritual Realizer" but not the "human personality" — that simply don't hold upon actual examination of those earlier writings. Wilber himself writes, "I do not regret those endorsements, nor do I retract them." That may be so. But we do suspect that he also never wanted them displayed side by side with his criticisms, because the inconsistencies are just too glaring.

Here are Wilber's writings about Adi Da Samraj, in their entirety. Draw your own conclusions!

KEN WILBER'S WRITINGS ON ADI DA SAMRAJ

For a different point of view on Adi Da Samraj, and to hear the stories of people who have spent far more time in Adi Da Samraj's Company than Ken Wilber, please visit the Adi Da Up Close website.