The visual perturbations that Adi Da Samraj sets up in his language as it appears on the page (in addition to his striking metaphors, images, and neologisms) simultaneously imposes and undoes the medium by which we conventionally experience and know.
While the presumptions of meaning are undermined, meaning itself is not undermined, as the oddly methodical pages produce their strange and insistent pull towards some other state of being that seeks to be made visible.
It is as if the armamentarium of punctuation and sentence mechanics, hurtling on its way to being read, strains to keep us back, to anchor us in a reality which does not implicate us in these symbols.
Adi Da Samraj’s use of capitals and punctuation — an orchestrated carnival of underlinings, dashes, sudden commas and quotation marks, exclamation points and italicized passages — drives the words visually on the page in running cues and promptings, like that of a conductor impassionately compelling the music before him.
With stylistic force and innovation, Adi Da Samraj reconstitutes the language that we think we know, in constantly sliding tropes and signifiers that bounce their surfaces and depths off one another with meanings that point endlessly beyond themselves, like Raymond in his boyhood attic room, blowing about into the air millions of small particles, "the rectilinear volumes of the windowed Sun-light" that seem to form the "tiny geometries" of reality.
On one level the stylistic innovations in The Mummery Book are there to keep us awake: orthography as an anti-sleep device, an anti-mumming alarm meant to keep us from succumbing to our inherent resistance to the demands of a revelatory text.
Yet these "geometries" of sentence mechanics also become a kind of metalanguage, charged with radiant energy to straddle mere "meaning" and "Meaning."
The signifier is pulled up to a level through which the truth beyond the "Captive-room" can be expressed. After getting used to the orthographic exuberance of the sentences of Adi Da Samraj, readers may return to ordinary writing with a shock. A simple unembellished sentence appears pauperized and one-dimensional, a mini-script stripped of its full signification in a transcendent order of reality.
Perhaps its language represents the most original stylistic innovation of The Mummery Book, intuitively breaking down the difference between language and what it signifies.
Interpretation slights the living actuality that language describes; interpretation places itself between an object and the direct apprehension of it. Interpretation is a process in which meaning, subjected to point of view, acquires the figure of a parabola, approximating the path of a projectile under the influence of gravity.
Beyond Interpretation
But, as stated several times in The Mummery Book, "The symbol always points to its meaning." Hence, no interpretation is ultimately necessary — because symbol and meaning are one. There is no difference between the two, as in parable, which is etymologically equivalent to parabola, parole, palaver — something is expressed in terms of something else, but both are the same.
Therefore language, as Adi Da Samraj uses it, speaks to an immediately apprehensible core in us, which corresponds to the purity and transparency of silence. It is language free from the adventure of experience and the need to interpret it.
Paradoxically, one could also say that the very act of trying to understand The Mummery Book is to manufacture one more meaning, caught in another limited point of view.
But it is no longer a naïve understanding. It has been revealed to us that we are mummers who, at every turn, are helpless to escape the automatic doings of our illusory presumptions.
We have been brought to a standstill by the awesome yet terrible paradoxes of this vast maze of incomprehensible dimensions, which (on the experiential level) is felt as the source of our suffering and bewilderment.
Therefore, we are moved in our hearts by our hidden impulse to come to that point when we can truly say: "And Mummery, for me, will be — nomore!"
That impulse to self-transcendence is what Adi Da Samraj is here to serve — in writing The Mummery Book, and in offering to all the possibility of practicing his mummery-transcending, freedom-realizing Way, the Way of Adidam.
As He has said:
The world is psycho-physical. That realization is the basis on which The Mummery Book was produced. Everything we might call physical, material, or objective is spun together with everything that we might call subjective, or psychic and internal. It is all one force of mind or experience.
This accounts for the paradoxical quality of the communication about space and time in The Mummery Book. From the point of view of the objective mind, the world is just what it appears to be. From the point of view of the subjective mind alone, there is its own world and its own perception of things.
But when there is only one mind, and only one psycho-physical world, then there is a unique perception, or awareness, of existence. The Mummery Book communicates that kind of awareness, that kind of perception.
It is not the linear world of the objectified mind, not the mere interior world, the surreal world of the internal mind. It is one functioning mind, producing a history, or an adventure, until the adventure itself is transcended.
And that is the ultimate import of The Mummery Book — the complete transcendence of psycho-physical existence, or conditional existence, or limited existence.
