Lori, hate to do this but I gotta agree with them on this per adi da. He has huge controversies surrounding him. Also, I'd be concerned with anyone who had ties to any scientology (cause of the mind-control and hypnosis element).
wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Da#Controversies"There are allegations of abuse (financial, psychological, physical, and sexual) among former followers. In 1985 Adi Da and his movement were sued by a former member for (among other things) fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, and assault and battery; the suit sought $5 million in damages.[6] Adidam then filed its own suit naming the former member and five others for abuse of process, extortion, breach of fiduciary duty and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit further charged that the six former members tried to deprive the movement of its "constitutionally protected rights to freedom of religion". Adidam sought $20 million in damages. [7]
Around the time of these lawsuits, Adi Da and Adidam (then known as Da Free John and The Johannine Daist Communion) were subjects of a report on The Today Show.[21] There, and in other media reports, ex-members were quoted as saying that Adi Da exhibited a pattern of psychologically, sexually and physically abusive behavior.
Adidam charged that these public allegations were part of a conspiracy to extort large sums of money from the movement. [7] Adidam said that the former members, (some of whom appeared on the Today show report)[21] "met several times to discuss, conspire and scheme to obtain extraordinary sums of money from Adidam under the threat of destroying the church".[7]
Local media also reported that an Adidam spokesman disclosed that despite previous denials, controversial sexual practices involving the guru had continued after 1976 but had been hidden from some members and the general public. [22] An Adidam official said that no illegal acts took place and the movement had a right to continue experiments in lifestyles. [23]
In 2005, the Washington Post reported: '"The lawsuits and threatened suits that dogged the group in the mid-1980s were settled with payments and confidentiality agreements", says a California lawyer, Ford Greene, who handled three such cases.'[5]"
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Theres also a crapload on here about sexual allegations:
http://www.adidaarchives.org/sex_violence_women.htm"Adi Da (Da Free John) - sex with devotees, sexual abuse and assault, violence against women, and sexual issues in general in the Adidam cult
Editor's note: some of the items described below, and similar types of activity were discussed during live, in-person interviews with the media in 1985 by the individuals who personally participated in or observed these things. Please see the "'Media coverage of Da" page on this website for further information, in particular this post which cross references Adi Da incidents to news articles where they were discussed. "
That section has many links of interviews with women heres one of them:
http://www.adidaarchives.org/adi_da_sexual_consent.htmAdi Da Samraj (Da Free John) and sex with devotees – was it consensual?
Posted by former devotee in 2007
What’s missing from your assessment of what Adi Da did with and to women is an appreciation of the context in which it occurred. And that context varied dramatically from case to case.
There were obviously sexual encounters between Adi Da and his devotees that were consensual, out of the hundreds that have occurred. Among those consensual couplings one would surely find examples of every kind of motivation imaginable on both the woman’s part and Adi Da’s as well. Some women were attracted by Adi Da’s power, others sought the attention, acknowledgment, and bump in status within the Adidam community that sex with Adi Da would bring, and others sought spiritual initiation or an opportunity to overcome neurosis or dysfunction through sex with the God-Man. Probably, some women just wanted to have sex. As for Adi Da, his obsessive quest for more and different kinds of sexual gratification knew no boundaries over the years. As both a voyeur and participant, there seems to have been little ground he didn’t cover in the sexual arena, with a ready supply of new female members streaming into Adidam just ripe for the pickin’.
To accept the idea that all of these activities were a form of Adi Da’s selfless spiritual teaching for the sake of devotees would be naïve and absurd in the extreme. However, that’s exactly what he claims. According to him, in all of this he was merely reflecting his devotees’ weaknesses and obsessions back to them in order to help free them from the egoic patterns and attachments that were holding them back from growing spiritually.
However, it should be very obvious to anyone not entangled in Adi Da’s mythology that more likely he has just been exploiting his status as an “enlightened God Man” to seduce large numbers of women that were otherwise out of his league. This might not be criminal in most cases, but I would say it’s incredibly irresponsible and completely inappropriate for one who claims to be a spiritual teacher. It is deceitful. It is also inconsistent with any claim by Adi Da to have himself “transcended” obsessive sexual fixation as the first perfectly enlightened human being in the history of this planet. His endless search for sexual adventure, just like his obsessive personal use of poppers (amyl nitrate) doesn’t square up with his teachings about regenerative sex practice or with the idea that he was doing anything different than just getting himself off and in the process using sex to establish his dominance over everyone.
Apart from the cases of consensual sex with the motivations described above, there were many situations (perhaps most) where any so-called “consent” for sex was coerced or obtained under false pretenses. There are two slightly different aspects of this coercion that are worth mentioning. One is the exploitation of the implicit imbalance in power and influence that Adi Da had over devotees, akin to what a therapist has over a patient or a parent over a child, except all the more exaggerated since he was God Incarnate. Secondly, many women performed the sexual acts Adi Da commanded them to perform only because they believed that doing so was a requirement of their spiritual practice, or a means to transcend egoic attachments or neuroses, or perhaps an opportunity for tantric initiation. When many of the women later figured out that they were misled, of course many of them became extremely upset.
The account by Connie Shaw of her friend’s surprise anal sex with Adi Da that was posted to the Lightmind website is a good example of this. That post does an excellent job capturing the typical mind-set of a devotee living a rigid and disciplined life who has been idolizing an idealized image of the “enlightened Master” from a distance and is completely in awe of him. Suddenly the devotee is pulled into an unexpected and dissonant situation that is exploited by Adi Da, who has sex with her on the spot. That example is demonstrative of coercion or deceit when considered in the context in which it occurred, and I hardly consider the encounter “consensual” in the fullest sense of the word. You need to look at the mind-set of the devotee in this and all similar situations to evaluate what was going on. You also need to consider the time period of the event and what peoples’ expectations about Adi Da and the nature of the practice were, since all of this changed and went through extreme cycles over the years.
Adi Da was clearly abusive in some of these encounters, and at a minimum extremely insensitive in others. Once again, there is a full spectrum of behavior by Adi Da and all kinds of varying results experienced by the devotee. I can tell you that for some of my women friends, the results of Adi Da’s “teaching work” on their private parts have been confusion, injury, and disturbance that clearly did not serve them well. And let’s not forget the diseases that Adi Da spread, either.
In addition to the scenarios where the victim's "consent" was obtained because they bought into Adi Da’s deceptive mythology, he also used plenty of good old-fashioned bullying, yelling and brute force to have his way with women. Did the women Adi Da raped or beat up or whose hair he ripped out of their heads give their "consent"? Yes, I said raped. Read the posts by Conrad Goehausen, who talked in depth to a guy who together with Adi Da raped a woman who was begging and screaming at them to stop, and who also talked to the victim, who is still in Adidam. So, Conrad confirmed the event with both the victim and with Adi Da’s co-perpetrator. There is no way I can accept these as consensual activities. What's really sick, though, is that some of the women who were treated this way have blamed themselves, saying that they “deserved” the treatment they got, or even that it benefitted them as a form of spiritual instruction. For those who still worship Adi Da as God, how else can they interpret what happened? The mental virus of the Adi Da mythology runs very deep for the people who are closest to him. Then again, they would not the first battered women in the world to defend their abusers.
If you look at the history of Adi Da's sexual theater (or any other dimension of interaction) with his followers, a couple of other observations about his so-called crazy wisdom approach become apparent. First, it is obvious that he generally lacks skill and sensitivity in his teaching interactions with followers. He does not typically exhibit "skillful means" in dealing with others. Therefore, he gets bad results and hurts people, generating all kinds of negative fallout in the form of disillusioned former devotees and a huge fallout rate for membership in Adidam. So much of what he has done in the name of spiritual teaching is just foolish and ineffective, regardless of whatever else one might say about him.
Secondly, Da displays a pattern of reckless or careless indifference to the impact of his actions on those he claims to be teaching. He is all too willing to create disastrous effects in the lives and emotions of others, and then rarely attempts to help people work through the resulting mess he made for them. If his actions were really intended as a form of teaching, rather than a reflection of his own tendencies, he would at a minimum want to know what kind of effects he was creating for people. Even if he were utterly inept at teaching, but was in fact teaching, this would be true. However, his obvious indifference in most cases, or perverse pleasure in the suffering of others on some occasions, shows that most of his activities have nothing to do with teaching at all. They are just an expression of his own personality, wrapped up in the business of playing God, and an exaggeration of all that is good and bad in him.
A good example of this was the situation many of us know about when Adi Da told D.G. to perform oral sex on three of his friends. She was uptight about oral sex due to having been forced to perform it on an adult neighbor when still a child. After the three blowjobs in a row were performed, Adi Da himself had sex with D.G. and told her to leave his house. She had to sleep in a car in a parking lot and cried all night, and Adi Da never followed up with her to see what the impact of his actions were. How is it teaching to have sex with a scared and trembling woman, then throw her out of the house and never speak to her again? Adi Da was not failing at teaching people in situations like these, he wasn’t even trying to teach them. He was just entertaining and gratifying himself and enjoying the immense power over others than only God-Man status could bring.
Perhaps the most important question that can be asked about Adi Da's crazy wisdom activities is how effective has it been in transforming the lives of devotees and the world as a whole? Has it produced the intended effects in terms of spiritual growth and enlightenment for those involved? Where are the enlightened and transformed devotees who have benefited from 30 plus years of association with this powerful God-Man and what are they doing now? After all this time we still don't see boatloads of radically transformed beings, or even any at all -- at least none that are visible to an observer on the outside. People in Adi Da's group have just aged and mellowed a bit, stuck in a dependent relationship to a man who has limited them, rather than liberated them.
What is the rationale whereby the "shock therapy" of crazy wisdom produces self-transcending wisdom and awakening to the Consciousness that lives and breathes everyone and everything? Can one really "force" another out of identification with the ego by disrupting their life, causing them to indulge themselves in sex, alcohol, and drugs, and berating and humiliating them? Where do we draw the line on what is acceptable behavior to impart upon others "for their own good?" If beating up a woman and bruising her face helps to enlighten her, then what about breaking her legs? Where does it stop, and who decides this? And how does Adi Da's own self-indulgent and neurotic behavior, carried out in private, serve to awaken others to Truth, even when this behavior is hidden from them? This is something I’ve never heard him or anyone else address.
I think that all devotees and former devotees need to realize that this consideration of Adi Da’s motivations and effectiveness is really more universal and general than just examining incidents involving sex. Those of us who were sincere in our approach and who became deeply involved with Adi Da were just like Connie’s friend in one way or another. Even though we didn’t all have sex with him, the basic interaction was the same. We were all exploited in one way or another. The innocent hope and great awe that we approached Adi Da with was twisted and stolen by this self-centered sociopath to serve his own interests.