About the Author:
Mei-Ling Israel holds a degree in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. Her research essay, Seeking the Phoenix: Artistic Consciousness in the Nuclear Age, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art library in New York City. She is a working glass artist and a published poet and playwright. From 2001 2004, she witnessed Adi Da's artistic process as an assistant and sometimes photographic subject
About Adi Da Samraj:
From his birth (on Long Island, New York, in 1939), Adi Da Samraj has always manifested unique signs of spiritual illumination and of artistic and literary inspiration. Nevertheless, from his birth, and until his spiritual restoration at thirty years of age, Adi Da Samraj submitted himself to an ordeal of "self-identification" with all the limitations and sufferings of the human condition. Adi Da Samraj describes his early years as being focused in two fundamental activities: investigating how (in the scale of human "ordinariness") to perfectly realize the Truth of "Reality Itself", and achieving the ability to communicate the Truth of "Reality Itself" through artistic means (both visual and literary).
Adi Da Samraj graduated from Columbia University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy, and from Stanford University in 1966, with an MA in English literature. His master's thesis, a study of core issues in modernism, focused on the literary experiments of Gertrude Stein and on the modernist painters of the same period.
In 1964, Adi Da Samraj began a period of intensive practice under a succession of spiritual masters in the United States and India. Eventually, in 1970, after a final period of intense spiritual endeavor, Adi Da Samraj spontaneously became re-established in the continuous state of illumination that was his unique condition at birth--and that re-awakening signaled the end of his thirty years of spiritual quest.
In 1972, Adi Da Samraj began to teach, creating a vast repository of wisdom, in living dialogue with those who approached him. To date, his literary, philosophical, and practical writings consist of over sixty published books.
Since 1998, Adi Da Samraj has created a massive body of artwork using the media of photography, videography, and digital technology. He states that his intention as an artist is to offer a visual communication of the Truth of "Reality Itself"--by "allowing Reality to manifest Itself" in and as the "space" of his image-art.
Adi Da Samraj's collateral exhibition at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007), Transcendental Realism, marks the first time his work is being shown to the public at large. Other publications on Adi Da's art include:
Transcendental Realism: The Art of Adi Da Samraj (catalog of collateral exhibition),
Transcendental Realism: The Image-Art of egoless Coincidence with Reality Itself (a collection of thirteen essays by Adi Da Samraj),
The Spectra Suites (selected images from all ten of Adi Da's Spectra Suites),
The Quandra Loka Suite: 52 Views (catalogue of Adi Da's 2003 exhibition at Louis Stern Gallery, Los Angeles),
The Bright Field (selected images from Adi Da's black and white photographic suites of 2000-2001).
