The World As Light

The condition of non-separateness — as the true nature of the human situation, and the true nature of Reality altogether — is the core of Adi Da's communication in His art.

In The World As Light — An Introduction to the Art of Adi Da Samraj, Mei-Ling Israel provides a thorough retrospective of Adi Da's work as artist.

This richly illustrated, incisive overview is accompanied by Adi Da's own statements, through which He reveals His unique artistic purposes and clarifies the artistic process in general. This book was published on the occasion of Adi Da’s collateral exhibition at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007).

"The living body always wants (with wanting need) to allow the Light of Perfect Reality into the "room". Assisting human beings to fulfill that impulse is what I work to do by every act of image-art."

— Adi Da Samraj

The World As Light,
Introduction by Jonathan Condit ^*

Deeply involved in the artistic process since childhood, Adi Da Samraj has, in the last nine years, created a massive body of highly distinctive and highly diverse work. In that nine-year period, He has "stretched" the medium of photography — and also the medium of videography — in many directions. Most recently, He has begun to develop remarkable new potentials in the digital medium.

Adi Da's collateral exhibition at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007) marks the first time His work is being shown to the global art public.

The Biennale exhibition is devoted to His most recent works, from 2006–2007. The purpose of The World As Light is to provide an overview of His entire artistic oeuvre of the past forty years — accompanied by key statements He has made on His own art and on the artistic process in general.

Adi Da Samraj regards His art as building upon the modernist tradition. He greatly values the radical aesthetic freedom and the profundity of meaning characteristic of modernism at its best. And He intends His own art to convey the deepest of meanings — relative to the nature of the human situation, and relative to the nature of reality altogether.

As Adi Da makes clear, His art can be "read" as an immense investigation of the human condition — the condition of presumed existence as a "self" in the midst of a world that is "not-self".

Adi Da's art is meant to call into question the most basic presumptions of ordinary human life: the "fact" of existing as an independent "self", the "fact" of every "self" being separate from every other "self", the "fact" of the "self" being separate from the world of "everything else". Indeed, Adi Da intends His art to communicate the profundity that is known when all presumptions of "separateness" are relinquished.

The condition of non-separateness — as the true nature of the human situation, and the true nature of reality altogether — is the core of Adi Da's communication. He makes this communication not only as an artist, but also as one who has given an entirely new process by which the illusion of separateness can be gone beyond.

Adi Da Himself has always lived and demonstrated non-separateness. His entire life has been a manifestation of uniquely profound spiritual illumination. And His constant effort has been to fully communicate the way of non-separateness — through His many published writings and discourses, and through His many works of image-art.

In His book Transcendental Realism, Adi Da declares:

Reality Itself Is Truth Itself Is The Beautiful Itself.

Ultimately, this is the vision He intends to convey through His art. Thus, He offers His art to the world as His communication of reality and truth--and, also, as an address to the "human necessity" for the "aesthetic experience of real and true beauty".

*Jonathan Condit is senior editor of the Dawn Horse Press.

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