Vice made me join three cults for this issue: Adidam, the Moonies, and Aleph. Since Adidam tops the list of “controversial groups” at cult watchdog Rick Ross’s website, I figured it’d be the best place to start. Also, their whole deal is worshiping a guru from Long Island who now lives on Fiji and looks like a cross between Yoda and a man-frog. This, cultwise, is about as good a vibe as it gets.
I called their New York number and got a chipper-sounding guy named Gene who told me there was an introductory study group at an apartment on the Upper West Side the next night, to which I said, “Cool, thanks.” He then told me, “You know, it’s really amazing once you begin devoting your daily attention to the guru and enter into that heartspace, how it cuts through all the everyday crap of the world and moves you closer and closer to the state of god-union. It’s almost like an alchemical process.” I said, “Cool, thanks.”
The apartment was owned by an old gay couple who looked like an engorged George Lucas and deflated Jerry Stiller respectively. Everybody sitting around the coffee table when I came in was well past their 40s and kind of looked like extras from a really boring sitcom. We went around the circle and explained how we’d been turned on to Adi Da Samraj (Frogger’s guru name), which mostly consisted of having run across a book somewhere. Then we got to a sweat-suited lady with white cigarette-burn scars up her arms who, not too surprisingly, used the conversation as an excuse to dredge up her drug history.
Her twitchy, ponytailed brother raised the stakes, however, by launching into a half-hour dissertation on how, after dismissing him due to his stance on yoga, Adi Da’s spirit came into his room and forced him to wear it like skin, which led to some later freak-out on a train. I zoned out for a lot of this, but the gist was that his consciousness now resides about a foot above and slightly behind the head of his physical body, kind of like in GTA.
The night’s main event was a 40-minute video comp of “Beloved’s” lectures from the 80s. Every few seconds, Teddy, the Lucas-looking gay, cut the tape to share an anecdote of his time with Beloved or explain the nuances of his behavior. For instance, when he paused at length between sentences and darted his eyes back and forth? That was him dissolving the karma of every being who ever lived. And when he kept locking eyes with different people in the audience? Drawing power from their devotion so that he could retransmit it through his gaze, of course.
I was worried there’d be some sort of intensive discussion once it was over, but everybody just got up and wandered into the kitchen for some iced tea and crackers. I bought a tape called When the Tiger Disappears, featuring a naked Beloved on the cover, from the bookselling table. Ciggy assured me it was a choice cut. Henry, the guy in charge of the table, gave me a little Xeroxed schedule and said I should come to a “Celebration of Good Company” at the cult’s group house out in Brooklyn the next weekend. “There’ll be chanting and testimonials,” he told me enticingly.
That Saturday I got to the house a little ahead of schedule and plopped down on the couch with a copy of Adi Da’s autobiography, The Knee of Listening. I was just getting into how his dog dying first led him to realize his own divinity, when an older woman in a makeshift sari sat down next to me and asked what I could donate for the meeting. I put in $15 over her insistence that I didn’t have to pay the full fee since I was a student, and she cut me a deal on my own copy of Knee from the book table.
While we were haggling, a similarly robed mommish-looking lady draped a purple cloth over a TV tray in front of me, then set up a little mini shrine with a portrait of Beloved, a scented candle, and some big orange flowers. After everything was in order, she bowed to the picture and started stepping back and forth with both hands raised, mumbling something non-English-sounding. After the first few paces, the registrar woman fell into almost-sync next to her.
Eventually a few of the folks from the apartment showed up (though sadly not the crazies) along with a young, dumpy-looking Asian girl and a woodchuckesque former hippie, and things got under way.
The house leader, a trim, 40-year-old black guy named Dale who had one dangly turquoise earring and a smooth, open-collared suit, came forward and explained the chant he’d written to start things off.
“You probably don’t know any of these words, but that’s OK,” he told us, “They are full of great meaning which your heart will understand even if you don’t. Also, I forgot to make copies this morning, so if you could just pass it around that way everybody can see it.”
He then walked back to a keyboard set up behind all the seats, set the rhythm to samba, and began leading us through a melody that sounded like dialing a long-distance number, but more drawn out and with the words “Adi Da” every couple of syllables.
Somewhere around repetition 50, he cut us off, let the drums go for another measure, then came back into the living room to talk for an hour about his recent trip to Fiji to worship Adi Da, which I tried as hard as humanly possible to stay awake through.
After he finished, a younger gal came forward to talk about her recent stay on Fiji, and it was lights out for real. When I came to they were putting on a 15-minute video to wrap things up. Rather than lectures, this video consisted of a three-minute shot of Beloved mounting a stage in front of a crowd of devotees followed by a fucking 12-minute close-up of his unmoving face, which everybody around me stared at like it was a magic-eye poster.
The next study group was back at the apartment that Thursday. I got there about 20 minutes after it was supposed to start and went through the open door to find the living room completely empty. Expecting to stumble in on some frenetic orgy of middle-aged saddies, I made my way down the hallway to the bedroom, but there found only housemates George and Teddy checking their email at separate computers.
“Well, you’re the only one here,” George told me. We walked back into the living room and watched yet another video of Adi Da, this one featuring a Q&A with some of his astonishingly stupid followers from the late 70s (one woman in one of those Kate Bush sack dresses asked “What do you think of infinity?”). I was really expecting some sort of chat about the purposiveness of life or whatever this time when it was over, but Teddy just mumbled “Pretty good tape,” and headed back to his room with Bob.
Right as I was about to leave, Bob called me back to his desk and said, “I’ve been trying to e-mail you about our upcoming retreat but keep getting bounced. Can you take a look and see if this address is right?” For some reason he had inserted the numeral 6 right in the middle of my name. Adidam is the worst cult I’ve ever been in.
THOMAS MORTON
TO BE CONTINUED:
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