ADI DA, THE WORLD-FRIEND

Adi Da was born in New York, in 1939. The author of over sixty books, he has lived in Fiji since 1983 and is a Fijian citizen.

Throughout his early childhood, Adi Da enjoyed a state of extraordinary spiritual illumination. At a very early point in his life, he intentionally relinquished this state, in order learn the cause of human suffering and the way to go beyond it.

Later, as a young man, Adi Da immersed himself in the traditions of human wisdom and spirituality. His Western studies included university degrees — in philosophy from Columbia, and in literature from Stanford. Following his university years, he intensively engaged both Western and Eastern forms of spiritual practice.

Eventually, at the age of thirty (after a final period of intense spiritual endeavor), Adi Da was re-established in the freedom of the illumined condition he had known in his earliest life. After that, he began to offer formal instruction in spiritual practice to those who came to him — creating (over the course of several decades) what is now an unprecedented body of spiritual, philosophical, and practical writings (www.dawnhorsepress.com), as well as his literary masterwork (the Orpheus trilogy), and an immense body of visual art. In 2007, his artwork was shown as a collateral exhibition at the 52nd Venice Biennale (www.adidabiennale.org). Adi Da has also “curated” a library of the world’s greatest practical, philosophical, religious, and spiritual wisdom, and his annotated bibliography of this collection (currently running to over 8,000 books, videotapes, DVDs, and CDs) is entitled The Basket of Tolerance.

Adi Da is not political in any ordinary sense of the word. Rather, his address to humanity and the process of civilization comes from his lifelong intention of communicating the truth of existence — uncovering both the essential driving forces of limitation and suffering and the means to go beyond those forces.