An Interesting Weekend:
Adi Da Samraj’s The Mummery Book as Theater

Jack Foley

       I was recently invited to watch a “theatrical enactment” of a novel called The Mummery Book. The enactment was to take place about two and a half hours away from where I lived, and I was offered free transportation and lodging for myself and my wife, Adelle. Another poet, Martha Cinader, was offered the same arrangement, and she accepted too, though she provided her own transportation. Martha and I were being brought to the event as literary consultants and were asked to provide commentary on the proceedings. The Mummery Book, I learned, was written by Adi Da Samraj, of whom I had never heard.

       Looking for information about Adi Da Samraj, I came upon the web site, www.adidam.org. This is the kind of prose one encounters there:

In the midst of this dark and bewildering epoch, the Ruchira Avatar, Adi Da Samraj, has come to this human world to establish a unique Spiritual life and culture that is not based on mythology. The Way of Adidam, Revealed and Given by Him, is a Divine Revelation never given before. Adidam does not require your belief. Adidam is not a conventional religion. Adidam is a “reality consideration” at every level of experience. Adidam is a universal offering, made to every human being who is moved to go beyond ego-life and participate in a Divine process-here and now.

The Great Process comes about when the Divine Intervenes, Appears, Incarnates, Blesses, Teaches the understanding and the transcending of ego--such that the direct Divine Blessing may be received and the Great Divine Yoga may be entered into. This is What I Do.

       I noticed, though, that there were some statements about Adi Da (as his “devotees” regularly refer to him) made by Richard Grossinger--a poet and publisher I know a little. I phoned Richard and asked him about Adi Da. Richard praised the depth and intelligence of Adi Da’s spiritual writings--over fifty published books--though he was a little less enthusiastic about the author’s artistic efforts: in particular, Richard said, “I was never able to get into The Mummery Book.”

       Adi Da Samraj was born on Long Island in 1939. His CV states that he “spent his early years concentrated in two fundamental activities: an all-consuming investigation of the means for realizing truth, and the development of the capability to communicate truth through artistic means, both literary and visual.” He graduated from Columbia College in 1961 with a BA in philosophy, “then went on to graduate studies in English literature at Stanford, obtaining his M.A. in 1966. His thesis was a study of core issues in modernism, focused on Gertrude Stein and painters of the same period”:

       In 1964, Adi Da initiated a six-year period of intense practice under a succession of highly accomplished spiritual masters in the United States and India. Finally, in 1970, he experienced a spontaneous awakening of such force and profundity that he knew his spiritual quest was complete. As an expression of the import of this awakening, he eventually took the name “Da,” the fundamental meaning of which (in various languages) is “the giver.” Understood esoterically, it is a reference to the Divine as the Giver of sound and light--that is, the Giver of the entire realm of manifest existence.

       Adi Da wrote The Mummery Book in 1969--a year before his “spontaneous awakening.” It was revised and expanded in 1998. The book is Adi Da’s ideas made into a kind of spiritual opera--an over-the-top novel which is full of exceedingly odd writing.

       Here is the way the book begins. Adi Da’s hero is named, with perhaps a nod to J.M. Barrie, Raymond Darling, though Raymond is less a “character” than an embodiment of a spiritually questing consciousness. (One of Adi Da’s figures, “the terrific cute creature” with “big eyes--and a round, bald head,” may be a transformed version of Tinker Bell: “We can Fly, Raymond.”)

       Raymond Darling was Standing, in the room. Then, sitting. Until, he Fell! To a Whitest death--by Falling! Down, to all his life.
       At first--and all the while he Stood--his strong, right hand, above his head, was Higher than all the stars of natural light. And the Hole, where all the universe begins and ends, was there--in his True Heart. And he Spoke the Conscious “Hum” of Thunder-Light--Aloud!
       He felt the natural heat of his body, rising up--and fusing with his raised right hand. His face, and his right-hand’s fingers, and even all the curves and angles of his body, were a Standing-Openness, to his own and very Love-Bliss-Light--Divine, and Highest High--above his head-to toe of human shape.
       And, So!, he Stood.
       Then, he sat--down!
       Down!--on the high-back chair Provided.
       There, he rested both his hands, within his lap. And he looked--Around! He looked at the wallpaper--and the shape of the room.
       There was a slight chill.

       I should also mention that the production I saw had been presented a week earlier, but only for devotees. Adi Da had written special material for that presentation which was not included the following week.

       How many people have longed to break out of temporality, to experience existence itself rather than the mere fact of existing, acting in the world. Is this possible? Is the abstraction “existence” merely a trick of words--something experienced only in language? Surely we “exist,” but does that mean a quality called “existence,” apart from any particular existing thing, can be experienced? Adi Da’s book does not solve that problem but documents the attempt to arrive at such knowledge. The following passage occurs early on in The Mummery Book:

 And Raymond looked at the room.
He thought--there Is no Consciousness, in the room.
And he thought--how to put It, there?

 He saw the room--Itself.
He saw the Midnight Sun--the Un-centric Sphere of Boundless Bright.
He saw the room Is Consciousness. The One and Bright--Itself. The Conscious Light. Love-Bliss Itself. Free Standing. Self-Existing. Self-Radiant. Indivisible. Only an Enjoyment. There.
He saw This.
He did not appear--except for This.
And There Is Only the wallpaper. Only the room--Itself.
The room--Itself--Is He.
And She Is the Only Light--within It.
He-and-She.

Quandra is the principal female character in The Mummery Book... “Loka” means “place,” or “realm.” Thus Quandra Loka is “the realm of non-separation from the beloved,” or “the realm of absolute unity”--the Indivisible Space of Conscious Light.

“Point of view” is the essence of ego-life: The apparently individual being presumes that he or she is a particularized “point,” or organized “point of view,” in space-time. And that “point” is “made” by contracting from the condition of totality--and, indeed, by contracting from even every mode, form, or condition of conditional existence. Therefore, the camera is a precise mechanical equivalent of the ego--because it, too, functions as fixed “point of view.”

In my use of the camera, I work to make images that go beyond, and even undermine, the conventions of “point of view.” Such images transcend the limitation that would seem to be inherent in the photographic mechanism (or “point-of-view machine”). They allow the viewer to see and feel the “room”--or the world, or reality--as it is, beyond the ego’s self-reference. And such images thereby become a non-verbal means of “picturing” the essential human process of ego-transcendence--going beyond the fixed “point of view” of the ego, or the core presumption of separateness.

The living body-mind inherently wants to realize the matrix of life, wants to allow the light into the “room.” Making it possible for human beings to fulfill that impulse is what I work to do. My images are created to be a means of participating in reality as fundamental light--the world as light, relationship as light, conditional light as absolute light.

       Writing about The Mummery Book, Adi Da insists that “the world is psycho-physical”:

Everything we might call physical, material, or objective is spun together with everything that we might call subjective, or psychic and internal. It is all one force of mind or experience...From the point of view of the objective mind, the world is just what it appears to be. From the point of view of the subjective mind alone, there is its own world and its own perception of things. But when there is only one mind, and only one psycho-physical world, then there is a unique perception, or awareness, of existence. The Mummery Book communicates that kind of awareness, that kind of perception. It is not the linear world of the objectified mind, not the mere interior world, the surreal world of the internal mind. It is one functioning mind, producing a history, or an adventure, until the adventure itself is transcended. And that is the ultimate import of The Mummery Book--the complete transcendence of psycho-physical existence, or conditional existence, or limited existence.

       In a paper I wrote some years ago, “Doubleness in Alfred Hitchcock: Seeing the Family Plot,” I asked how it was possible for the mind to become aware of itself in an entirely visual world, a world in which everything was an “outside.” The answer I arrived at had to do with doubles, self-reflection, what I called “an essentially narcissistic and projective process by which the mind arrives at itself as it is mirrored and opposed in the world.” It is by generating doubles--mirror images--that we see ourselves. As Adi Da is aware, the water which is one of the primary experiences of his work has overtones of the “pool” in which the mythical Narcissus sees (and falls in love with) himself. The artist wishes to turn that narcissistic image into genuine vision, to transform the merely self-reflecting pool into an image of reality--to turn “water” into “light.” Or, in the case of The Mummery Book, to turn something like autobiography into a universal process of visionary discovery, “the complete transcendence of psycho-physical existence, or conditional existence, or limited existence.”

       Does The Mummery Book--or its theatrical representation--do this? No, but the very effort to do so leads somewhere, pushes us towards something. The book is in many ways simply impossible. There is practically nothing in the way of characterization or even plot; nor does Adi Da have the command of language (or the ear) of James Joyce, who constantly turns words into modes of music. What it has instead is audacity--but it is a rather magnificent audacity. What chutzpa! There are powerful, brilliant passages in the book, to be sure--and even well-written, beautiful passages--but there are also extraordinarily dull stretches, longueurs in which all those exclamation points, capitalizations and underlinings are trying (in vain) to assure the reader that something Significant is happening. Adi Da has a definite tendency to preach, though exactly what he is preaching is by no means always clear:

       In His True Heart, the He and She Are Always Already One--and Free! There, in His True Heart, They Are As Is--One Only, Self-Existing, Bright, Self-Radiant, Immeasurable, Infinite, and Absolute. His True Heart, Itself, Is That One--Which was, by a little thought, reduced to particularly two. The two of ego- “I,” itself--the separate self, Narcissus, observing the ordinary “other” of its self-reflecting thoughts. And They--Who Are but One--only seem, by Heartbreak’s Fall, to be Narcissus at the pond. Forever seeming-made a Sudden! Dying mass of now--that is, by mundane pairs, reflected--number-mad--in multiples of equal and opposing force, squared and rounded by the zillionaire-retarded speeds of ordinary, measured light.

The theatrical representation of The Mummery Book was a clear reflection--a double--of the book’s audacity. It was an amazing, exhausting experience. The novel was “adapted” to the stage only in some senses: every word of the novel’s text was spoken, and as an actor said to me, “spoken clearly,” in accordance with Adi Da’s instructions. It takes a fair amount of time to speak--and stage--a 176-page novel. On the first day we were in the theater from 12 noon to approximately 8 p.m., with two half-hour breaks, one at 2 and one at 5. One hundred fifty-six pages of the novel were covered. On the second day, we were in the theater from 11 a.m. to a little after 12:30 p.m. The concluding twenty pages of the novel were covered. I expected the second day to be much easier than the first, but as it turned out it wasn’t really. There was far less spectacle on the second day and some very long (if interesting) speeches. (The second day also featured the longest death scene I have ever encountered.) Where I was sitting made it difficult for me to slip away to the bathroom, so I experienced some discomfort both days. I remarked to a tech person who had been working very hard and very well, “There are religious tracts. And there are urinary tracts.” She smiled. (The play’s first section has a fine scene in which Raymond and his father enjoy the great pleasure of peeing together: I remembered that scene at those moments when I squirmed. The temporality of theater and the temporality of novel reading are not the same thing!)

       The enactment, like the book (the entire text was projected onto a screen, though it was sometimes difficult to read the words), was divided into various sections. Part I, “The Incident,” is divided into “The First Room,” “Quandra Loka,” and “The Mummery.” That is what we got on the first day. The second, much shorter part, “The Judgement,” is also divided into three sections; their titles--as in Adi Da’s photographic work--are mirror reflections of the first sections: “The Mummery,” “Quandra Loka,” “The First Room.” In effect, the novel goes out and comes back to where it began. If in a sense Raymond “goes” somewhere in his adventures, in another sense he simply stays where he was. The concluding chapter deals with Raymond’s death, but Raymond’s death has already occurred in the first paragraph:

 Raymond Darling was Standing, in the room. Then, sitting. Until, he Fell! To a Whitest death....

       The first section of the book deals with Raymond’s problematical separation from “Mom and Dad” (“And Raymond Fell!--from childhood’s Heaven!”). The second section deals with his meeting with Quandra and “would-be-Liberating Love.” It is a progression outward. If the first section has to do with Raymond’s inward struggle to differentiate himself and to remove himself from his parents (though Adi Da points out that Raymond’s father is “Raymond Darling” too), the second section moves Raymond further into the world as he encounters his “True Love” in it. The third section moves Raymond’s psyche further still into the world as he presents himself publicly in the context of a religion which he is surprised to discover has him as its central feature. This religion was created by a very dubious character named “Evelyn Disc,” who tells lies about his relationship with Raymond. Suddenly Raymond has not only a “love” but “followers.”

       The concluding three sections, ending in a description of Raymond’s death, suggest the inadequacy of such “institutional” religion and its “dreadful ‘followers.’” Evelyn places Raymond in a mental institution; Quandra is dead, though Raymond persists in asserting that she is still alive. One of the major themes of The Mummery Book is Adi Da’s insistence that falling in love with a human woman means falling in love with something that will die: “The pall of mortal loved-one’s memory always lies, within an Open grave....” It is necessary for the image of Quandra to transform itself into an entity which transcends the merely human: “Quandra Loka is ‘the realm of non-separation from the beloved,’ or ‘the realm of absolute unity’--the Indivisible Space of Conscious Light,” an area over which death has no power. At the end of the book, Quandra and Raymond are reunited--but they are both “dead”:

 And There Is Only the wallpaper. Only the room--Itself.
The room--Itself--Is He.
And She Is the Only Light--within it.
He-and-She.

       There were great puppets (including a Raymond puppet--slightly resembling Howdy Doody--and a marvelous nude “Divine Lord” puppet with an enormous dong); the puppetry was under the direction of Lisa Bady. There were screens on which various images were constantly being projected by the production’s four cameras. Sometimes we saw Adi Da’s photographs, sometimes we saw other images--at times video versions of the actors who were performing in front of us. These various screens and images suggested multiple “takes”--multiple versions--of reality. There were also dancers, fine musical selections, singing, audience participation, and some (female) nudity. Energy abounded as the actors--especially in the opening section--spoke Adi Da’s prose with enormous verve and understanding, the words finally becoming a kind of music which we experienced along with everything else. We saw “Raymond” as two different actors (Daniel Hebert and Alexandre Mérineau) and as a puppet--though at times he merged with the narrator. (Steve Brown played that character--conceived for this production as similar to the narrator in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town--in a wonderfully interesting way, moving about the stage, frequently interacting with others, never losing his enthusiasm or the clarity of his narrative voice as he spoke Adi Da’s often complex words. Everyone thought--so flawless was Brown’s performance--that he had memorized the novel’s text, but he told me later that someone was “feeding” 80 per cent of the text to him through the headphone he was wearing. If he hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have believed it.) Caitlin Quinby was a beautiful and effective Quandra, though I’m afraid I rather ungenerously felt that, beautiful as she was, she was just a little too old for the part.

       I found myself taking issue with both the play and the book in the second section--and then at various times throughout. The primary problem for me was Adi Da’s conception of love/lust. We are first given an ecstatic, fairly explicit scene in which Quandra and Raymond make love. Adi Da is “for” that: “The scent of Mai Bliss [cf. “my bliss”] was Burning!--everywhere. Like an incense-fire, on a Holy Pit of sacrifice--her thighs of human heartbeat called him out!” We are then given a scene in which another character, Bue Ma, pretends to be Quandra and performs a “lustful” (Adi Da’s term) go-go routine for a room-full of men, including Raymond. The routine climaxes in universal masturbation. The earlier incident of Raymond’s peeing with his father is a moment of male bonding; in this situation the men are all isolated from each other and maddened:

And all the gang of men were Mad! And all went Wild!--with killing-lust--within the cave of Wedding-room! And all their pricks stood up--to standing out!
Each man was moistened, to a Fit!”

       In addition, Adi Da’s conception of Quandra allows her to be an object of desire but does not allow her to be anything else. Though Quandra is his heroine, she is never once given a speech which indicates how she might feel. (And this from a man who affirms the necessity of multiple contexts.) Adi Da clearly means his parable of awakening to be “universal,” yet so many of the terms in which he couches it are specifically male--filtered through Raymond’s experience. What would happen if Quandra were allowed to speak her heart? What doors would open then?

       Is The Mummery Book an unknown masterpiece? I don’t think so--though it is certainly an extraordinary production, especially when it manifests as theater. As art, Adi Da’s photography is perhaps more clearly “successful.” Yet The Mummery Book definitely has its moments as it pushes and pulls us and forces us into new perceptions. If nothing else, it affirms that the world is full of symbols and that language is (or can be) their breeding bed.

       What is “mummery”? A dictionary definition is “1. A performance of mummers. 2. An empty or ostentatious ceremony or performance.” And what is a “mummer”? “1. An actor. 2. A pantomimist. 3. A person who wears a mask or fantastic disguise, esp. in some localities at Christmas, New Year’s, and other festive seasons.” Adi Da’s actors, who wore masks and “fantastic disguises,” were, literally, “mummers.”

       In the book, “mummery” is a way of speaking about the entirety of earthly existence:

And--when I, also, look into the Lofty Sphere of His Most Intimate Regard of Her [Quandra Loka]--I will Behold What Love has made of death. And Mummery, for me, will be--no more!

       One last thing. Adelle and I were hosted throughout our weekend by Bill Gottlieb and Denise Getz--two devotees of Adi Da’s. We couldn’t have asked for better companions. Bill and Denise were unfailingly gracious to us--as, indeed, were all the devotees we met. I don’t know whether the graciousness and kindness we experienced is a reflection of the spirit Adi Da inculcates in his followers, but I would certainly like to believe that it is. Bill remarked on the sheer diversity of people present. “They have nothing in common,” he said, “except that they are all in love with Adi Da.”

Jack Foley