The Ancient Walk-About Way
During his childhood, and on into his years at Columbia College, New York, Adi Da Samraj was possessed with the question: What is 'consciousness'? By 'consciousness' he meant that very sense of existence, or awareness of simply being that which is constant in us, whatever the events and changes of life. In the modern scientific view, consciousness is the by-product of an electro-chemical process originating in the brain, and, therefore, dependent on the survival of the body. Thus, according to this opinion, consciousness, which seems to be our most fundamental condition, disappears at death. This is the message imparted even officially by the institutions of modern civilization . Adi Da could never accept it, because he had a greater tacit knowledge, which had been self-evident at his birth.  Adi Da Samraj was born in New York in 1939 into an ordinary lower-middle-class family but he was not in an ordinary state. As he describes in his spiritual autobiography,The Knee Of Listening, he enjoyed in infancy an unbroken condition of Radiant, Blissful Being, which, from childhood, he has called the 'Bright' . But he discovered in his earliest years that this sublime Reality was not obvious to others. And so, in a great impulse to embrace the human condition completely and, thus, to illumine it for all Adi Da spontaneously relinquished that native awareness of Reality. From the age of two, he submitted to participate in the human dilemma, the presumption that one is a separate mortal entity in the midst of a bewildering and threatening world. Nevertheless, the 'Bright' persisted as an under-current of Truth that kept driving him to the root of things until all obstructions fell away, and the 'Bright' was Re-Awakened in him completely. From that point, he turned about to teach others. From time to time in human history, Great Sages have appeared who have, to one degree or another, agreed to instruct. Such a one does not teach from the position of an 'I' speaking to