See below, a letter entitled "THE BROWN LETTER Adidam History After Bhagavan's Mahasamadhi" which was sent to me some time ago. It states "The readers, reviewers, and the authors of this document make up devotees from the 1C, the 1st Generation, the 2nd Generation, the Gurukula, and senior members of the Adidam Institution." Please note, Julie and myself (Nick) were not involved in creating this letter. I'm not sure when the letter was written, I'm guessing it was approx 5-10 years ago. Its interesting to read and reflect on if the assessment was correct at the time of writing and if it still relevant today...
THE BROWN LETTER
Adidam History After Bhagavan's Mahasamadhi
In the days and weeks directly after Bhagavan's Mahasamadhi there were a small group of longtime devotee men who met together to help guide and determine what would happen in the wake of Bhagavan's Physical Absence. These men know who they are, of course, although most devotees do not know this history. One of the dynamics they saw very early on was a move on the part of RQSR* to take charge and consolidate power and control
around her.
This was openly discussed and a decision had to be made about whether or not to intervene in this, or to allow it, thus excluding RNK** and allowing RQSR to hand-pick those who would extend her own authority. This was felt by many to be 50% a possible
mandate from Bhagavan, at least in her role of Cultural Governance. He Had Chosen her for that aspect of the general RSO*** body governing role. But in the way it was happening, it also was felt to be expressing longstanding patterns of rivalry, loyalty, and impulses of an Oedipal kind, perhaps to be expected.
A decision was made finally by a majority in the group to allow this and not to fight it, although an opposite choice could have been made. Several members of this original group of men now question whether that was the right decision; some outright feel now that it was profoundly mistaken, as it has had many direct, and in some ways negative consequences to the culture, mission, and community of Adidam. It certainly was not Bhagavan’s Intention that Adidam become a single-person, hierarchically driven, authoritarian community, but in the wake of that decision, and with no larger body of RSO devotees to balance things, that
is at least functionally what we have become.
After the first year, a group of LRO and LRO Office devotees had largely been approved around RQSR to direct and implement her understandings of the way things should happen in Adidam. It is worth noting that this group is constituted essentially of people who will not challenge her thinking in any consequential way, or in a way that another groups of devotees, equally qualified, perhaps might. It may also be useful to note that this top-level
leadership group is not made up of those who spent truly intimate lives around Bhagavan, such as the Gurukula, deep First Generation devotees who Bhagavan Enjoyed and often actually Insisted having around Him Physically, or any devotees in the 2nd Generation of Adidam.
The leadership body could also be said to be characterized by a certain type, not exclusively, but mostly. That type being, of the more institutional, bureaucratic, orthodox, radically committed, and dependable type, but not of people who could have lived in
or around Bhagavan's Physical Body in a very close way, or who would have been asked to. This speaks, in some devotees' views, to an underlying pattern of abstraction from the intimate Sphere of Bhagavan that now gets expressed in many, and predictable
ways. This is a generalization, but a valid one, and worth looking at..
Around the time of the Code of Sacred Governance, an effort toward a further consolidation of power and authority by that entire group took place, with an expressed interpretation of the Code as being something like a purely top-down hierarchy in which the answer to all of Adidam's problems could simply be found in the issue of obedience. If the 3C submits to the 2C and the 2C submits to the 1C and they all submit to the (now single) RSO authority body, all will be perfectly culturally aligned and thus Bhagavan Will Be Able to Work.
There are devotees deeply familiar with the Code and the Notes to the Code who feel that this is an unfortunate and misaligned reading of the Notes and Code. There are also many unresolved questions about how the Code was formed, what was put into it and not, and what Notes were specifically excluded for what seems now to be theological or power-based reasons. This is a tangential conversation, but worth noting that even the Code is
not considered to be legitimate by some devotees with a scholarly level of knowledge of the Codes origins and the Notes that must inform it.
It is also worth noting that resistance to this brand of Adidam began to appear immediately by groups of devotees who saw and felt, and also directly knew, about the history above and the flaws and revisions in the Code of Sacred Governance. But the underlying impulse to set things in place via the Code according to our current leadership unfortunately created, at that time, an environment of excessive fear and repressive control.
To name a few instances, there were moves to consider the Code more deeply, to re-examine Bhagavan's Notes, to entertain a broader and more open community conversation about it, attempts to convene formally, all of which were rather violently or summarily squashed. This has been the case for the last five years and its created what many devotees have called a culture of fear in Adidam, where to a large degree, devotees have
inculcated in themselves a fear of speaking up or challenging in any way our received theology or leadership or culture as it is spontaneously made, or the evident consequences of that culture to all practitioners.
This fear is deep and community-wide, and it takes very little to expose it. You need only ask a devotee to put his or her name on a challenging or dissenting communication and watch them run, regardless if they agree with it 100%. This is not a culture that Bhagavan Wanted or ever Cultivated Himself, but it is a loyalty culture that could have been predicted and was seen happening on the Island in the earliest days. Members of the Gurukula, for example, felt even recently as if they could not even be seen speaking to certain devotees while they were on Naitauba, for fear it would get back to RQSR, with relational consequences.
Devotees with dissenting or alternate views of Adidam culture and history have all receded into the woodwork and will not speak up in any open way for fear of being removed from their service, or from any access to Naitauba, or of being outright excommunicated (put on hold). This is not at all to target or blame RQSR, or our current leadership, it truly is just a pattern to be acknowledged and compassionately understood.
Our reigning culture now, with its prime values of obedience, top down authority, and control, has not gone without huge consequences to the culture of Adidam as a whole. It has led, in many ways, to the culture we always create in the absence of Bhagavan's Direct Intervention a culture of abstraction, non intimacy, behaviorism, language-driven ideology, a focus on getting with the program, a culture of programmed events with little spontaneity, presentations that come across as edicts allowing for no conversation, and a general theological environment that suggests we've got it all figured out, and there is nothing more to question or culturally create. Of course, this stifles the vital energy, creative output, organic discriminative intelligence, and joy of all devotees. It has, and always has had,
the net effect of penning Bhagavan in, and stopping His Intervening Power that allows for a truly healthy creative destruction, even in the unfolding of Adidam culture in time, with
all of the growth and ego-death processes that must be perpetually allowed for Him to Function Spiritually.
The consequences in the larger culture of Adidam are not merely psychological, they are very tangible. For example, its worth noting the Leela of Bhagavans Life during the Teaching Years, or even up through at least the year 2000, is not systematically being preserved or recorded, as you would, for example, if you were the Smithsonian Institute charged with preserving and protecting the True Lifetime Sayings and Doings of the Avatar of the Earth. And First Generation devotees actually now feel it’s not necessary to record their own true Leelas of Bhagavan. This is because of a theological edict that seems to say all of that history
was simply the ego and therefore has nothing to do with Beloved.
This is an example of a profound mis-reading and misunderstanding of Bhagavans Notes on this subject, which in fact Demand that we not only record, in all detail His Teaching
Work Leela, but that we enact it theatrically, and regularly, and re-tell it, for all of its obvious utility for devotees and the worlds understanding of human and spiritual Realities. This is one example of a profound and truly irrevocable loss in Adidam culture to date, very much made possible by the culture we’ve permitted to gain near total control of all internal Adidam discourse.
We see the culture of Adidam as stuck in a longstanding historical pattern of behaviorism and ideology. The community of Adidam is afraid, disheartened, and filled with a sense of failure and futility. The Mission of Adidam is absolutely dead, and cannot be revived
in the current cultural model, because that model is so unattractive, even to the vast majority of devotees, that it cannot possibly be advocated with any real or authentically felt passion. Public people looking at Adidam see everything that we do not, or choose to not see: our implosion, our ideological rigidness, our loss of creative and artistic vitality, our deep psychic dividedness in the population, and our near total lack of open, internal
conversation about anything at all. We look like what we are: a dysfunctional family with a shadow a hundred miles long and everyone keeping it in place out of fear, shame, and a strange protection of the abusive core. That is not to be judgmental, but just to be technically explicit about the somewhat ordinary, or conventional psychological patterning at work.
It's not at all an accident that we've reached a state of near complete collapse in Adidam financially, psychically, and functionally. This was predictable, and also was predicted, by
many devotees as much as four years ago, and this prediction was brought to leadership in many explicit ways, and yet it has always been repressed with much prejudice. So devotees, in a fundamental way, have simply thrown up their hands and said, Ok, let it die. Or alternately, have said, in line with current theology, "Oh well, everything is just Bhagavan, so this must be what He Wants, and He'll Fix it, if we just keep going as we are" It should be clear to any devotee who lived with Bhagavan that this passive asana is not one He Himself would Tolerate, and it defines fairly explicitly what He Called the "Cult of Adidam", in
Notes like those at the bottom of this document****, Given days before His Mahasamadhi, which now seem so subversive as to be literally unpronounceable. If words like those in the Notes below**** were published by any devotee, even using other vocabulary and phraseology, that devotee would immediately be barred from service and put on hold. And that fact alone says much about our current state of affairs, one in which it is worth noting, that not a single word of criticism has been given, or even been allowed to be directed toward our own culture: since the day our Master Died.
It is felt by many devotees that a Convocation is the only way to truly break or even address our stuck patterning at this point. We simply must have an open conversation among the body of devotees that is not restrained by fear and shame, but that allows for free expression and rejuvenating discourse among us. There is no one to blame and no one to target. Our history is what it is, and it could be desperately worse. Most esoteric
communities have eradicated their Master's Presence and Intervening Power entirely within the first five years of the Masters Death.
We are along this road, but not without extreme self consciousness about it, and that is a great virtue. In fact, some would say the great distinguishing virtue of Adidam relative to all
other religions is this: our ability and willingness to acknowledge that we are Mummers and we make Mummery, that we scapegoated and threatened our Masters Life constantly, and that we are really not to be trusted. But on the flipside, that we have incredible power of change and transformation because we’re conscious of this fact. We don't have to merely live out the Mummery pattern unconsciously. We can grow within it, we can kick it out occasionally, or often, and we can have a sense of humor about it. We can make it a creative theater of Consciousness, rather than be ruled by its historically dark and all-controlling, unconscious force.
The Convocation of Adidam must happen, and it must eventually, though not initially perhaps, get down to this level of conversation about our collective reality. There will be
disagreements and controversy and necessary "heat". But there will also be humor, transformation, and unexpected liberties. And there will be an utterly needed reconnection to Bhagavan and a resumption of a far more intimate and direct relationship to Him.
One that we have almost lost, except individually and collectively, in our best and most profound moments.
The readers, reviewers, and the authors of this document make up devotees from the 1C, the 1st Generation, the 2nd Generation, the Gurukula, and senior members of the Adidam Institution. No one is out to get anyone, everyone wants the same thing. This is true of our community as a whole, but we are not functioning as a true community yet. That is the mandate of the moment, and we very much hope to see the Bright House Board bring it into
being, with all appropriate strength, vulnerability, and uncompromising integrity.
Thank you for reading this. It has been somewhat painful to collectively produce, but also necessary to put on the table. We have nothing but positive visions of the near future. Bhagavan Is and Will Be Victorious, if we simply allow Him to Be.
Sincerely,
Devotees of Adidam in the Everybody All at Once
*Ruchiradama Quandra Sukhapur Rani
**Ruchiradama Nadikanta
***Ruchira Sannyasin Order
****Notes are not included
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