SEVENTEEN COMPANIONS
Original Writings and Talks:
Literary Masterwork
Book Six:
The Mummery Book
A Parable Of The Divine True Love, Told By A Self-Illuminated Illustration
Of The Totality Of Mind
The Mummery Book is Avatar Adi Da's literary masterpiece—a work of astonishing poetry and deeply evocative archetypal drama. It is Avatar Adi Da's life-transforming message about how to Realize the Absolute Truth in the midst of the chaos and tragedy of human experience.
An extraordinarily beautiful and potent "prose opera", The Mummery Book is both a highly experimental novel (drawing fully on the twentieth-century "stream" of experimental fiction) and an immense theatrical piece. Thus, The Mummery Book can either be read as a book or performed as a theatrical event.
A "mummery" is "a ridiculous, hypocritical, or pretentious ceremony or performance". This, Avatar Adi Da is telling us, is what human life amounts to—if we merely live as the separate ego-self. And the only way "out" of this mummery is to relinquish ego—by finding, receiving, and conforming ourselves to the Divine True Love.
In The Mummery Book, Adi Da confronts head-on the central agony of born existence: that everything and everyone—ourselves, and everyone we love—dies. The hero of The Mummery Book, Raymond Darling, goes through an extraordinary series of adventures and ordeals—centered around his search for his beloved, a lady named Quandra—in the course of his ultimate overcoming of the inescapable fact of mortality. The story of Raymond Darling is, in fact, Avatar Adi Da's telling of His own Life-Story in the language of parable—including His unflinching portrayal of how the unconverted ego makes religion (and life altogether) into a meaningless mummery. Ultimately, The Mummery Book is the "Story" of Consciousness Realizing Its Indivisible Oneness with Energy (or Its own Radiance).
The Mummery Book is a work of many "flavors". By turns, it is exquisitely poetic, outrageously humorous, intensely erotic, sharply satirical, devastatingly tragic, and (ultimately) radiant with the promise of redemption from the mummery-world of the ego. To imbue His Communication with the greatest possible force, Adi Da makes boldly innovative use of the English language, stretching the language to its limits, and also of the conventions of punctuation, fashioning them into a kind of "musical notation" to indicate myriad nuances of inflection.
The story plunges the reader into the realm of potent archetypes. Raymond Darling experiences a series of incidents that represent key transformations in the process of his human and Spiritual growth. It is on a deep, and even surrealistic, level (rather than on an ordinary surface level) that this sequence of incidents "makes sense". Each of the incidents encapsulates a whole world of experience, and each incident is narrated in a style of language that particularly fits its mood.
The process by which Avatar Adi Da composed The Mummery Book is in itself remarkable. As a college student in the late 50s, He conceived the intention of writing a work of literature that would give expression to everything He was to discover in His quest for Truth. Eventually, He developed a method of writing that involved keeping a moment-by-moment written record of His stream of conscious perception. He intended this monumental "journal" to form the "raw material" for His projected literary work. However, He eventually found that the tens of thousands of manuscript pages of this journal were altogether too unwieldy to mold into something of readable length. Therefore, in 1964, He burned the entire mass of this manuscript, confident that the literary work would eventually take form out of the cumulative subjective experience of which the manuscript was a record.
Five years later, in late 1969, He sat down and wrote the original text of The Mummery Book in three weeks, with virtually no revising. The text was "born" whole, out of all His years of human life-experience and Spiritual investigation. He then left the manuscript in its original form for almost thirty years, returning to work on it again only in the mid-1990s. In 1998, He made extensive additions to the original text, informed by the immense Work of His years of Teaching and Revelation. Thus, The Mummery Book is truly the fruit of a forty-year process.
The Mummery Book is regularly performed by devotees of Avatar Adi Da in the month of January—as part of a celebration that honors the Great Yogic Event of January 11, 1986—as well as at other times of year. A full performance (which includes every word of the book) lasts approximately eight hours.
An experience that is (simultaneously) devastating and utterly sublime, The Mummery Book is Avatar Adi Da's multi-dimensional exploration of the process of Divine Enlightenment, fashioned in the non-conceptual mode of ecstatic literature.
If Dylan Thomas and Buddha shared a soul, The Mummery Book is what I would expect from such a joining.
Robert Boldman, poet;
author, The Alchemy of Love
The Mummery Book is brilliant in all its aspects. It would be hard to express my happiness at the way it breaks and exposes the heart of the world. Living and working as a writer for many decades, I have not encountered a book like this, that mysteriously and unselfconsciously conveys so much of the Unspeakable Reality.
Robert Lax, poet
author, Love Had a Compass;
co-author (with Thomas Merton), A Catch of Anti-Letters
In The Mummery Book, Adi Da Samraj has created an astonishing work which, through a skillful weaving of mind-challenging techniques, seems to re-define the very essence and usage of the English language, in much the same way as Shakespeare restructured it almost half a millennium ago, and, it seems to me, for a similar purpose—to offer, through an autobiographical exploration, a heart-opening invitation to feel the human spiritual journey at its core.
With its unique, spare, and invitingly compelling rhythmic style, where words dance with colorful abandon, and are poetically refreshed with startling, mind-shaking effect, The Mummery Book comes even more alive when it is read aloud, just as Shakespeare's works were written to be seen and heard. While reading it, I find myself constantly urged to speak its brilliant cadences, which buzz my brain with new forms of perception.
Just as I find fresh knowledge with each re-reading of Shakespeare's plays, no matter which work, each time I return to The Mummery Book and its masterful boldness, the way its words startle and surprise and cry out from the heart of its creator, I feel blessed by its beauty and I am moved by the truth that pulses through its every image.
Kenneth Welsh
Actor—many roles on the stage, in movies, and on television;
Recipient of six Gemini awards for excellence on Canadian television
A reading experience that is nothing short of explosive (the "real" world of power and need dissolves into a mere mummer's play) and revelatory (a new, ecstatic relationship to life is glimpsed).
Frederick M. Dolan
Professor of Rhetoric,
University of California, Berkeley
The Mummery Book is a book with many levels: an apparently naive level of narrative and poetic invention (concerning Raymond Darling, his beloved Quandra, and his friends, followers, and betrayers); an allegorical level (concerning the coincidence of opposites, gender, and romantic love); an esoteric confessional level (concerning the education of a soul through a kind of platonic anamnesis); and, subsuming all other levels, a revelatory level (concerning the nature of consciousness and how it is continually lost in the ongoing "mummery" of ego-constructed existence). This comprehensive level begins and ends as a confession of divine identification.
The central stylistic achievement of The Mummery Book seems to be its undoing of the mummery of words: words ordinarily are deployed in books as serious and loyal ants, carrying their load of sense to their destinations. Adi Da's poetic inventions make words crackle and swoon, pound and soothe with suggestion and insistence.
Philip Kuberski
Professor of English, Wake-Forest University
author, The Persistence of Memory; Chaosmos
The Mummery Book pierces the mind with strange elation. The terrible beauty of the writing is stark and urgent. The prose paints and chants while language buckles and soars—as if Gertrude Stein had met Ramana Maharshi, Joyce had a vision of St. Francis, Beckett had not got stuck where he got stuck.
Any real comparison would have to go back to Hamlet or Lear. Death and the absence of love CANNOT be accepted. Life is not ordinary. No complacency avails. There is no escape from the divine drama of everything. An explosive mixture of pain and joy creates an apocalyptic heart-melting crisis.
The book enacts itself as you read it. The heart can hardly bear to confess it remembers such knowledge.
This is our own drama.
Geoffrey Gunther
author, Shakespeare as Traditional Artist
Read Excerpts:
The Great Bird
The Terrible Secret of the Human Heart in Love
Raymond's Final Soliloquy
The Great Bird
From Chapter 13
In chapter 13, Raymond Darling encounters a gigantic bird at a secret lake. The great bird suggests the untamed Energy of natural existence—and Raymond's eventual survival of this harrowing encounter is a key victory.
Here, and throughout The Mummery Book, Avatar Adi Da makes unique use of punctuation, underlining, and capitalization, to create a kind of "musical notation" indicating the inflections of each sentence.
In the morning, Raymond was, still—asleep.
The fateful Day, grew warm—with the Inner Dawn of Living Light.
With the Dawn Horse, of full Sun-rise—time grew warm enough for insect-time to tick the day awake! And the inner-Lighted draft of everything, Whirled! off the space of nature's dark.
Eyes closed, for now.
No sound, to speak of. Except, a kind of tidal whisper. A feeling-sound, of unfamiliar—Water!
A Great Sea-Change of space-time's transformation-mind was, slowly, nearing him. He felt Its signal, coming to him—a little at a time. Hush! Be, Calm—he feels. The promised Water! Coasting, under him. Making "Here-Is-Something" Speak, beneath his wonder's ears.
Raymond's Listening head is mounted—with his body, ear to ground—upon the stumps of Earth-edged Water-World. Listening!
Then, the fateful wind of Real Today, begins to curl True Water, to him. . . .
And, then, the sudden world!—for Raymond's ears and eyes of feeling-heart's Deep Heart!
And Raymond Jumped!—Up! To Largest Water! Now! True Water!—Beyond the dreaming-fisher's lake!
And great, gray feathers—slowly—moved beneath his underfoot!
He saw It!
Side to side.
He sees It!
On the Great Water, while he watched—the great, gray body of a monstrous bird! coasted forward, off the Water-top!
"Great Bird!—It Is!"
The wings were, suddenly, unplanted from the shorse. Its feet were—Loudly!—Sucked! Up! Up from the helpless, ugly mud beneath Its taloned feet! And Its head was pointing, soundless—off the Water! Out to landless Sea—It seemed to Say!
A great, broad prow of spines! With enormous, sky-blue eyes! A masthead-knob of grizzly flesh, as red as fire, was nested at the shifting bow of This!—the Greatest Ship of Flight!
But, slowly! All the gray, fantastic Bird was—Terribly!—Lifted! off the Swoon! of Widest Water!
"Oh, Yes! It Is as Big as Water!"
The wings were hundreds of feet across! It was too large for land to know! Its body, broad as Ocean's beach! An un-Wed Hen, from a Loveless natural hell! With a Whirl! of natural, killing forces in Her chest!
Her head was a mile away, from Raymond's underfoot! But, all the forest made a catastrophic, Sucking! sound, beneath his melting Prance! of shoes—the moment She made Her Gigantic Move! And all the emptied caverns of the land She Sucked! away, were Filled!, in a moment, with Her Sea-Change waves!
Raymond's body pursed, and slanted, in the wind of immensest death—that rose, to dawn, in bleeding shadows! And She took his head with Her—to nature's End of any God at all!
top
The Terrible Secret of the Human Heart in Love
From Chapter 17
Raymond and Quandra have their first ecstatic meeting in chapter 16. Then, in chapter 17, they confront the sorrow of their mortality—the inevitable "fact" that the loved-one is destined to die.
Raymond Held! Quandra, and she Held! him—in each-in-the-other's arms. And warmed each other—now and then. With small kisses—on each other's head, and arms.
And they each wept—alone—together. Mourning the "What" they could not speak to say.
And their Broken! hearts of mortal, human love were Living-Water-Drenched!—with sorrowing their one-another. And how, that they, exactly, lived—and lived, at all. And how, that he could, never, now, forget her. And how, that she could, never, now, forget him. Except, there is the all-the-other-worlds, that do not know them—and, yet, will come-and-go—forgetting them!, forever, in the natural flow.
And, when their tears were all pulled up, from the final peg that measured both their feeling-hearts—and natural exhaustions dried the mortal source of Loved-Ones-Well—Raymond's Quandra sleeped away.
And Raymond put her—Deep and down—within the would-be-Wedding-bed of grass. And—as a Bridegroom might have bent, to flatten, neat, his drowned Bride's funerary pall—he smoothed her flower-of-gowns. And walked—away.
And Raymond walked, within a narrow-cadenced pace—back, through the darkening woods. Back—to the where from which he came.
And the narrow cadence pounded, Loud!—and timed his Quandra-Image, in his mind. So, he would know—and not forget—the Terrible! Secret of the human heart, in love. The Secret that turns boy to man—and Kills! the virgin loved-one, in his arms. The Secret that sends man to woman—far away from childhood's fateful home. The Secret that sends man away—at last—from even woman-love.
And Raymond walked—to Find a True House—of his own. A True House—made of True-Heart's own Divine True Love. On True-Water's own—Eternal, and un-dying—bed. The only True and deathless Wedding-bed. The bed of Living Light—That Always Already Is!
The Raymond-House is, yet, too far Beyond his human touch—of Quandra-Love. It Is a House, too far—and farthest Far—Beyond. Beyond this Truly human grief—that follows first and True embrace, of feeling-hearts, in mortal love.
The farthest memory—farthest Far from the True Heart's True Beyond—is the cannot-be-forgotten memory, of the mortal loved-one of the feeling-heart. The natural loved-one, Found in the dying Fall! The Fall from All the Living Light—That Houses the True Heart's Eternal Sphere of He-and-She, That Is Divine.
That awful memory, of natural true love, feels to such a feeling-Find, that feeling Falls too Deep—into the God's End of all life.
The pall of mortal loved-one's memory always lies, within an Open grave—of True Heart's death-transcending Deep of Is. And, even while they live, true lovers only die.
For now—until he Deepest-Knows the True Heart's House, again—the born-to-dying Raymond only knows the sorrow of his Fall, to life's true love.
He needs to Realize—again—his more-than-human Love. The Divine True Love—That Feels Beyond the deathful tragedy of merely-human Joy.
He Is The He. That Falls to She.
And She Is She. That must, yet, Fall, to die—on Him.
He must, yet, Manifest The All-There-Is of His Divine True Love.
Or else, the Death-Tax He must Pay Exceeds the human Wealth of All They Gained, to here.
top
Raymond's Final Soliloquy
From Chapter 27
The latter half of chapter 27 is a remarkable inner monologue spoken by Raymond. He has been confined to a state mental institution by those who profess to be his followers. His "insanity" consists in refusing to uphold the principle of ego-separateness as the foundation of existence. In the final monologue, Raymond contemplates the nature of his relationship to Quandra—which archetypally represents the "relationship" between Consciousness (or Being) and Energy (or Light, or Radiance). He has (in an earlier chapter) seen her dead body, but he cannot accept this "fact" as meaning that he is eternally separate from her. The following passage is the beginning of his "stream of consciousness", leading (in chapter 28) to his ultimate realization of utter non-separation from Quandra, coinciding with his own physical death.
We are, it seems, allowed to Marry—if nature's bed would only keep the Bond. But, death permits the "Eternal Union" only in the afternoons. And only if the garden does not rain.
I always attend—of course. Each afternoon, I go to the appointed Place. I go, sweet-smelled—like all the other flowers. This flower, of my body, is the only one she gave for me to keep. And all its seed and blossom is the Cutting! that Remembers her. And, so, Remembering, I go—to meet her, after all.
This garden is the garden of no-mind. Who can Remember the every detail—of a flower, or its fruit, or any given tree? What grows, is always changing—always new. Memory has no purpose, in a garden's "Wedding-bed"!
This Place is tended by the mad—where I visit her. Or, am I mad? And she is dead?
That I am mad, and she is dead—my feeling-heart can never know, or fondly understand.
It wants to be so beautiful. How carefully, in every plot of growth, the mad avoid the angular. Everything in Rounds. Those who visit here are said to become Divine.
It says, in hospital writing, on my wall—I am allowed to go to garden, in the afternoon. Each day. Weather permitting.
The other insane do their Circles in the mornings. Briefly enduring their unimagined lives—before the Sun Cracks! their skulls.
I always tell the "keepers"—Quandra is to meet me. By the stone chairs.
Therefore, I wait. I feel as if I am waiting for the gardener—to Cut! the intrusive sprouts, from my ever-growing mind.
Was I the gardener—this morning? And did I already Trim! the hedge and edges—from this natural mind? And is there any mind, of me? Or, only nature's "thing", of thoughts? And is she there—in mind? Or, Is she here?—in me!
top |
