About Avatar Adi Da Samraj

Founder of Fear-No-More Zoo

Adi Da Samraj, Hawaii, 2003.

Adi Da Samraj was born in Long Island, New York, in 1939. The ordeals and adventures of His life as a baby, a young boy, and a teenager were informed by a profound Spiritual intuition and impulse to realize the Source of all things and to save the world. Even as a small boy He spoke of this. Much of Avatar Adi Da's life-story is recorded In His autobiography, The Knee Of Listening.

Avatar Adi Da's first Spiritual Teacher was not a human being, but a cat, whom He named Robert. They lived together on the Pacific Coast in Tunitas, California, in the mid-1960s. Adi Da said the following about Robert: "Robert himself was nothing less to me than my best friend and mentor. He was more, not less, than human to me. All of his ways seemed to me an epitome of the genius of life . . . and I loved him as deeply as the universe itself. I recognized that Robert had been my Teacher in the wilderness. He had filled my eye and owned a thread of attention in my heart. I knew him and he knew me. Nothing could replace that state of life or console its absence. I treated him in death like a saint. I had him cremated, and I kept his ashes."

Many years later, at The Mountain Of Attention Sanctuary in California, Adi Da Samraj created and developed a sacred site which He named Holy Cat Grotto. A bronze statue of Robert was placed on the cliff above Holy Cat Grotto, and Robert's ashes were ceremonially installed there. Avatar Adi Da has said that it was Robert who gave Him the name "Da".

Adi Da Samraj has been moved to give His life to the wild and rare possibility of inspiring the development of a completely new human culture that will allow for the full embrace of all of the non-human cultures as well. He said that one of His intentions is to make us all sensitive to the fact that everything is conscious—walls, fans, rocks, plants, moving creatures, the weather, water, the Earth itself—everything.

For more information about the life and teachings of Avatar Adi Da Samraj, please visit the Adidam website.