One unsuspecting Saturday night late in 1999. I was asleep on the organic cotton futon on the floor in the front room in the tiny, handbuilt, all-natural, non-toxic house in Northfield, New Hampshire. My two kids, babies, and my partner, Debbie, were snoring loudly in a shared bed in the back room after homemade pizza in the wood-fired, Finnish soapstone, Tulikivi oven while Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion played on the radio. Prairie Home Companion and pizza made from scratch with all of our own garden veggies was a regular ritual practice back then. Including a couple of bottles of fine red wine from Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Berkeley, CA… possibly a ripe newly released Beaujolais and a beloved Bandol Rose
I had fallen asleep as had everyone else probably in the midst of the mythic Lake Wobegon story-telling or soon thereafter. Drifting in and out of conscious awareness, I would find myself surrounded by rising and falling waves, oceanic sound currents, rivers and tides of ambient sound... What I didn't know at the time was that, having forgotten to turn off the radio, I was listening to a musical set on a weekly, late-night program on FM radio called Hearts of Space—begun in 1973, by former architect, Stephen Hill, out of his fascination with “contemplative” music, which originally aired on KPFA-FM in the San Francisco Bay area, and was eventually syndicated across the United States and picked up by NPR.
Eventually the radio host, Stephen himself, came on with a deep, sonorous, disembodied voice which caused me to perk up my inner ears. He stated that for the past hour or two... which had been a small, timeless eternity for me... that we, the radio audience, had been listening to a set he called, "Arctic". The music he played was intended to induce abstract feelings akin to— the deep blue water and drifting currents under the ice in the Arctic Ocean. He then read the playlist of the entire program
which included composers from all around the world, from many different periods of time. The only words I heard that I made a mental note of before drifting back under the ice were
DRIFTED IN THE DEEPER LAND
The next day, or Monday, I went to Borders Music Books and Tapes, a newly opened store in Concord, New Hampshire, and inquired of a young woman dressed in a bright sari with a painted bindu mark between her eyebrows at the information desk. Do you have anything.... Drifted to, Drifted in, upon… the Deeper Land? Music, books, or, tapes... I don't know what I'm looking for exactly
She applied herself instantly to a keyboard and video monitor next the cash register and soon blurted out cheerfully... Drifted in the Deeper Land
AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ!!!
Walla!!
And the rest is history.....
It turned out to be an odd, obscure book. With cool art on the cover. Self-published by the author, through his own publishing house, The Dawn Horse Press, established in Loch Lomond, CA, in 1972. I had her order the strange book immediately. In a week I was reading the weird book
Drifted in the Deeper Land by the—Self-Proclaimed Avatar—Adi Da Samraj.
In actuality, the ambient, mystical musical composition of the same name, Drifted…., was written by an American composer, Ray Lynch. Ray Lynch had borrowed the title of his musical composition from a line in another, even stranger, book by Avatar Adi Da Samraj called, The Mummery. The line... "drifted in the deeper land"... is from a very particular, “romantic” moment in the book, The Mummery, when Raymond, the main character of the book— which was turned eventually into an eleven-hour epic… “spiritual ordeal”!!! a multi-media, live-performance, madcap extravaganza, yearly, mandatory-attendance… stage play… the crowning glory of the “Acting Guild of Adidam”
When Raymond has just made love for the first, and, sadly, tragically... last time... to his beloved, first-last-and-only… wife-to-be... wife-to-never-be... who will die on their wedding night, or, rather—the night before they are wed—his Beloved Quandra… THE SHE… whom he will never marry, then
Anyway, they—the ecstatic couple in the throes of young love par excellence— in the book, have just made… mellifluously, meticulously described… mmm-mmm good… “honey-dripping” love, and, in his post-orgasmic, coital glory, Raymond is feeling
DRIFTED IN THE DEEPER LAND
Lucky boy.
So, Ray Lynch, a “long-time devotee” of Avatar Adi Da Samraj— as I was later to come to understand, and meet Ray, and thank him personally, at the Mountain of Attention, a hermitage sanctuary ashram of Adi Da’s, in Clear Lake, northern California—and tell him “my darshan story”… this preposterous tale of my first encounter with Beloved Adi Da, through the mysterious connection of this obscure musical composition, Drifted… which
appeared on dear Ray’s “new age instrumental” 1989 album, No Blue Thing
Uh huh.
So you see.
Some dude living in northern California whom I never heard of… with the sketchy-sounding name, Ray Lynch. An otherwise perfect stranger to me, composed a “new age instrumental love song”… (Whatever the finger fuck in the spanish moss that is!?) For another Raymond dude, a make-believe character in a nonsensical book I had never heard of… and, for his personal guru, his—Beloved Adi Da!! Another unheard of nobody, a virtual nothing to me…
And then. Out of the clear midnight blue skies, in nowheresville, Northfield, New Hampshire, in the fateful year 1999… out of No Blue Thing
I just heard “it” one night… caught a random phrase… having no interest whatsoever in any of them… the composer, the guru, the character in the… any of it!!
And, miraculously… I woke up!?
By what means, Holy Oracle!? Cardinal Coincidence? Or Criminal Conspiracy?
Spiritus Sanctus.... "Spiritual"..... otherworldly, inexplicable by ordinary means... communication perhaps?
You mentioned the word “spirit”, Diane. I'm not sure what you meant by it. Everyone seems to mean something different and
"nu agey" in their use of that word these days. Anyway, it brings up this unavoidable topic, "spirituality", if I am to fully explain what brought me to northern California, and thereby answer your question. To put it nakedly, simply
I was "called" to northern California by Avatar Adi Da Samraj.
In 1999, I had never heard of the notorious First Last and Only Seventh Stage God-Realizing Adept, Adi Da Samraj, who was born, Franklin Jones, in 1939, in Long Island, New York. But, that was to change radically and irrevocably in the final year of the twentieth century. For I was about to embark on an epic journey that would lead me eventually into His Most Illustrious Company
Into His Direct Service, into His Private Hermitage Sanctuary Ashram in Trinidad, California, Tat Sundaram, into the Company of His Samraja, the hundred or so folks who traveled around with Him... Serving His Physical Body
Into His Divine Presence... on many private occasions of Holy Darshan.
