Adidam is a complete Way of life, the gift of Avatar Adi Da Samraj. As His devotees, we practice this Way in relationship to Him because we recognize, at heart, that Adi Da Samraj is Real God appearing in human form.

Adi Da was born Conscious as Perfect Love, Bliss, and Happiness - a state He calls "the 'Bright'". And He is here to make it possible for everyone to Realize that Perfect State.

(From What is Adidam?)

It's beginning to look as if the latest Watergate character isn't so much Mark Felt as his daughter Joan Felt:

As both praise and criticism of Joan Felt and her family swirled last week in the national media, she disclosed the family's motivations for coming forward now, why money was a family consideration and how her father remains a "sensible and wise" participant.

Felt, who has lived with her father in a two-story home in northwest Santa Rosa for the past 13 years, said her 91-year-old father deserved to be released from the secret he had held so long.

"I think it's so important for a person getting into elder years, when death is somewhere around the corner, to be unburdened," Felt said. "At that time of your life, you (shouldn't) be holding up appearances or have something troubling your heart and have to keep it a secret."

Her comments came two days after a media frenzy that included reporters and camera crews camped on her front lawn. Joan Felt, 61, took a quiet moment in her car on the way home from Rohnert Park for an exclusive cell phone interview with The Press Democrat.

While she wouldn't talk about her father's decision to go public, and while the family has refused to make him available for interviews, she was frank about her own motives.

"There were many reasons why we decided to do it. I won't deny that to make money is one of them,"

[Emphasis added.]

...impoverished themselves while the group's founder lived opulently with nine wives and 30 followers on a Fiji island...

The Adidam place (or someone) seems to be pulling the links but this Google cache (if its still there) illustrates that Joan Felt of Santa Rosa is more than just a devotee of Adi Da Samraj; she's listed as an official contact for the Adidam Study Group:

Santa Rosa Adidam Study Group
Joan Felt
707-XXX-XXXX
santarosa@aboutadidam.org

[NOTE: I edited out the phone number myself.]

But here's what Adi Da says about having a fulfilling death:

Death makes your entire life bullshit. Don’t you see? That’s the problem. The body is going to die, every relation of the body is going to die. You can’t even depend on it continuing for another moment while you’re . . . associating with it. That’s the situation you’re in, but you use fabrications of mind and so forth, individually and collectively, that distract you from the fact of it, so that you won’t feel it profoundly. And so you build up this whole lifetime of endeavors, of attachments, of things you own, things you do, things you’re known for, things you know, things you know about — on and on and on. And it all passes. But in the meantime. . . you bullshit one another, effectively.

The Great Matter doesn’t confront you merely in death. It’s just that in death you are disarmed and you have no choice. While you are alive, you delude yourself! You fabricate a reality that’s not altogether true, in order to give yourself a sense of permanence, continuation, certainty — as if life is about being enthusiastic, about fulfillment of the next desire. In fact, you could easily drop dead in any moment. All kinds of people drop dead every day. And a lot of them haven’t lived a very long life beforehand. All kinds of terrible things are being done by human beings to one another and otherwise by the situation itself.

So you can participate in the round of desires and consolations as much as you are able for a lifetime, however long that lasts, and then be necessarily confronted by profundity at the point of death. Or you can go beyond even right now and exist in that profundity right now. . .

True religious life is a great profundity. But the religious life that people propose for themselves and propose to one another, generally speaking, is the life of consolation, of distraction, of arbitrary beliefs that suggest some kind of continuation (or even permanence) of the present pattern.

It’s not merely the state of the world at the present time — which, of course, is dreadful — but it’s not merely that which confronts you and suggests that perhaps you should become serious. Even if it were not as chaotic as this, the great profundity still confronts you and you could embrace it — or you could continue to ignore it. . . . The same profundity that exists in death is right now. The vortex of fire exists right now. And the fundamental Light exists right now.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj, Easy Death

Perhaps the only interesting twist to the saga of the family was Joan Felt's involvement in the unusual spiritual movement known as Adidam (and even that kind of thing is par for the course in Santa Rosa). Adidam, founded in 1970, is hard to explain -- it has undergone as many changes of doctrine as name (it has at various times been known as Dawn Horse Communion, Free Communion Church, Free Primitive Church of Divine Communion, Crazy Wisdom Fellowship, Johannine Daist Communion, Advaitayana Buddhist Communion, and Free Daist Communion). Its leader, currently known as Adi Da (but originally known as Franklin Jones), the son of a window salesman from Long Island, proclaims himself a "God-man" who has arrived on Earth to "perfectly fulfill the ancient longings of the human heart."

Adidam has somewhere between one and three thousand adherents worldwide. Not only is Joan Felt one, she was listed as the Adidam coordinator for Santa Rosa until Wednesday, some time between 6 and 9pm, when her name and number were hurriedly removed. She is still listed as one of the sponsors of a book on Adidam known as The Mummery Book.

Denizens of the Adidam website went wild over the fact that one of their own, whom many apparently recognized by name or face, had become so suddenly famous -- and over the potential financial reward their religion might reap. "They [Adidam's administrators] are fearing attention of the press, I assume," wrote one newsgroup correspondent identified only as "E". "At the same time, they are cooking on the thought of some of this 'white hot' Watergate bread being channeled their way." Some wondered out loud if Joan Felt was planted in their midst by the FBI. Others commented with surprising frankness on how much of a space cadet Joan Felt seemed at the press conference. "she had on this idiotic grin during the TV footage," said "C." "At first I attributed that to pride at the news of the uncovering of this secret. But now that there's an Adidam connection, I attribute the grin to the shakti-bliss of the divine master!"

I don't know whether I'm in a state of shakti-bliss or not, but I can't shake this feeling that Felt's decision to out himself after years of denial might not have been his own. There's a doctrine called undue influence which might apply.

Which only raises questions about who else might have been unduly influenced.

Stay tuned to the White Hot Watergate Bread Channel!