Early Life

Avatar Adi Da was a creative child, bringing simple enjoyment and humor to others as a puppeteer, an artist, a ventriloquist, and through many other activities. He also loved the outdoor life—swimming, fishing, playing in the woods.

Adi Da Samraj completely embraced the Lutheran Christianity of His family, and became something of a “religious ecstatic”. However, He also accepted (as part of His submission to ordinary life) the basic tenet of conventional religion: The idea of God as “creator” of the separate self and a separate world.

While happiness was the outstanding sign of Avatar Adi Da’s childhood, the darker side of life, its mortality and suffering, was also always part of His awareness. Death and fear were a counter to His sense of the “Bright”, and He became committed to embrace and thereby pass through them in order to find the way that everyone can transcend them.

Slowly, as He advanced through His teenage years, Avatar Adi Da’s certainty of the “Bright” receded, until only His impulse to recover it remained.

Purchase Avatar Adi Da’s biography, The Promised God-Man Is Here, by Carolyn Lee, Ph.D.

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