You Cannot Abstract Authentic Spiritual Teaching and Practice From Its Source, Community, and Culture

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SACRED HISTORY for January 30^th

1977 Adi Da Samraj Writes What To Remember To Be Happy (now Titled What, Where, When, How, Why, and Who To Remember To Be Happy)

1994 Adi Da Samraj Gathers with devotees and Criticizes the everywhere “Westernizing” approach to “religious” life and practice.

His Divine Presence, Parama-Sapta-Na Adi Da, Says:

“‘Westerners’ (some of them) want ‘religion’, but they do not really want God, the real, Real God. They do not really want a Guru. They do not want an ‘ism’—for example, all that nonsense one hears about real ‘religion’ having nothing to do with ‘ism’, so (now) Buddhism, Hinduism, all those ‘isms’ are just some sort of a body of ideas.

Instead, all of you (as ‘Westerners’) are to take ‘religion’ on yourself, and (thus) it is all about ‘self’ and manipulating ‘self’. That is the only part of ‘religion’ that is currently getting any praise, in general. No God, no ‘ism’, and no Guru. Whereas, all of these are necessary and essential to the real ‘religious’ life: Real God, the Real-God-Realizer, and a real ‘ism’ (if we can use the term).

You cannot abstract authentic Spiritual teaching and practice from its source, community, and culture. That is the way of the ‘West’–you go to all the Spiritual books, you weed out all the aphorisms, a few ideas here and there, you mix and match, and affirm it somehow, attach yourself, glamorize yourself with it. That is not ‘religion’, not real ‘religion’.

Real ‘religion’ is practice within a true culture, in relation to a true Source, and it is about Real-God-Realization, not ‘self’-aggrandizement, or mere improvement of one’s social life and social behaviors. All of you come out of that barbaric everywhere ‘Westernized world’, and extensions of it–and remain subject to it, until you inspect and go beyond all those limitations.” ~Adi Da Samrajashram