Raymond crawled—until he found a room, beside a dark hall. The door was closed, except for a small space. He could hear Dad strike a match—and, slowly, exhale his smoke. Mom's feet showed, at the end of the bed. She softly rubbed her arches, over the knuckles and nails of her toes.
Dad spoke. "You have not seen It! Unless You have seen Your Loved-One, There!—as silent as the mail! And You, Exiled to Waiting, for Your Heart-of-heart to come, in ships—and slide along the beach."
Then, Mom raised her voice into a little peeping, twisting sound—as if to Echo-imitate a small boy, in his self-pity.
The Incident, The First Room, Chapter 7 The Mummery Book
But The Mummery Book is not only unique as literature — it is unique as revelation. It is the inspired utterance of an incomparable spiritual master, who has both realized and revealed the ultimate dimension of reality and identity: the Divine, "the Conscious Light of Being Itself."
And Adi Da Samraj is inviting you to respond both to The Mummery Book and to his numinous, attractive person and state of Divine Being, by which you may feel yourself pervaded and transformed as you read.
The Prologue and Epilogue of The Mummery Book contain the ecstatic Divine Self-Confessions of Adi Da Samraj. As he states in the poetic Prologue (here quoted in prose form): "I Am where the ego (Narcissus) renounces all its seeming place and time — and, thereby, 'Locates' the One and True and Only Room (of Me and Mine)."
Thus, at the beginning of The Mummery Book, Adi Da Samraj makes clear that the text should be approached differently than that of an ordinary book.
If read as just another novel — no matter how extraordinary it appears by ordinary standards — it will become just another "interesting" postmodern literary production.
But if you allow yourself to read The Mummery Book with receptive feeling, if you allow your mind and heart to be penetrated by its meaning and music — you may, in fact, find that the promise of the Prologue is fulfilled; that The Mummery Book "will Luminate your Mummery's-worth of inner he's and she's, and Banish every sense and shape of ego's 'I' from body's mind."
The process by which Adi Da Samraj prepared himself to make the revelations found in The Mummery Book is utterly remarkable.
While there are numerous examples of spiritually significant beings who used literary or artistic forms as means of communicating their vision of truth (Rumi as poet and Hildegard of Bingen as composer and artist are two familiar examples), Adi Da Samraj made his literary communication in The Mummery Book only after undergoing a spontaneously generated (and unprecedented) process of "reality consideration."
That process — entirely unconditioned by belief, preconception, dogma, or tradition — was intended to discover the nature of reality and truth, to live that truth, and (finally) to communicate that truth to others — by the power of his free and radiant person, and by the power of his writing.
An essential preparatory aspect of that process was his "total immersion" (at Columbia College) in the world of western philosophy, history, literature, and visual arts — in order to learn what western humanity (and, by extension, humanity altogether) was "about."
In that period of immersion in learning, he was simultaneously finding ways to express (through speech and writing) his own illuminated disposition — a disposition for which he found no complete precedent in any literary, philosophical, or spiritual writing (of the West or of the East, from any period of history), and for which he was required to create his own means of verbal expression.
Adi Da Samraj has recently described the writing process that he engaged as "reality consideration," and the extraordinary experience — and literature — it produced:
The writing process that I engaged while I was at Columbia College and Stanford University eventually led to the observation of the coincidence between "inside" and "outside" — extraordinary coincidences of apparently inward psychic events and apparently outward objective events.
The process of coming to that observation involved an examination of subjective history, personal history, and life-experience — but in a psychic and spiritual coincidence with all of that, which was revealing of dimensions about it that are not commonly observed.
Altogether, my writing was a process of re-examining the past, examining what was arising in the present, examining all kinds of subjective contents. It was also a process of observing how things were arising, looking at the perceptual details of things arising — happenings that I would observe, in the passing events of day-to-day ordinariness — until the coincidence between "internal" and "external" was spontaneously revealed.
Instead of being just mind-wandering and random memories, the so-called "subjective" process became a reflection — in advance, over and over again — of what was soon to happen "externally" (so called).
And this was the case not merely in relation to major events, but even in relation to trivial or incidental events. All kinds of events would be reflected in the process of simply allowing the observation (or the reflection) of internal content to happen, without any pre-judgement of (or attempt to control) experience.
Thus, this simple allowance became a process in which the "internal" was not merely remembering and controlling thinking patterns, but began to reflect a depth in which there is no distinction between "inside" and "outside." Such was the ultimate import of that entire process — in which the meaning of the past was also reflected.
Over and over and over again, there would be an extraordinarily precise coincidence between the "subjective" process and what would occur "objectively" the next day.
For example, I would see people in vision, in advance, and then come upon them on the street — or, otherwise, they would unexpectedly come to my door, and so on. Such coincidences between "inner" and "outer," past and present, and so on, were occurring with extraordinary rapidity and density.
It got to the point where even the most trivial of events would be known in advance, registered in observed awareness — whether in the waking state or the dream state. (And this still happens all the time.)
There was this extraordinary spontaneous process happening, illuminated from birth, in which there was an examination of "inside" and "outside" going on spontaneously — a process that ultimately demonstrated the coincidence, or non-"difference," between "inside" and "outside," and (thereby) revealed various things about the nature of Reality.
The Mummery Book is a direct result of all of those years. I made The Mummery Book from the "ash" of the burning of all of that early writing. And the earliest text of The Mummery Book reflected not just the past, but the future of my experience in the decades that followed.
Ultimately, I was moved to amplify the text altogether, to finish it in every sense — including literary. That is the form in which The Mummery Book now exists.
But, because of the process by which The Mummery Book came into being, it is by no means simply a "work of fiction."
As stated in the Prologue (using the ancient sacred language of Sanskrit), The Mummery Book is writing done as the "Maha-Purusha Medha" — the unspeakable sacrifice ("Medha") that the Divine Person ("Maha-Purusha") undertakes by consenting to appear and work in the world.
The Mummery Book is revelation written by the one who wanders in the "world-mummery" like the "Ashvamedha" horse of Vedic India, wandering the world in a mysterious and sacred ritual, for the sake of blessing everyone and everything.
Therefore, as writing from the Divine and about the Divine, The Mummery Book has the unique power and capacity to reveal reality to you — the "bright" reality beyond change, beyond death, beyond seeking, beyond duality.
