Bernadette Roberts’s assessment of Anadi

The headline on this post is a little misleading because Bernadette Roberts wasn’t talking specifically about Anadi when she wrote the paragraphs below, but I think they apply to him quite well. In case you don’t know, Anadi is a spiritual teacher who used to call himself Aziz Kristof and whose birth name is Krzysztof Jerzy Strzelecki. Update on May 16, 2020: He just changed his name again to Aadi.

To understand Bernadette’s paragraphs which I’m about to quote, you need to know that she uses the word “consciousness” in an unusual way: for her it’s a synonym of “self”.

Some of Anadi’s disillusioned students have been talking recently among themselves on Facebook trying to figure out where his teaching goes wrong. I don’t think it’s terribly mysterious.

The divine’s breaking through the center of consciousness shatters the ego like a hole made in the center of ourselves. To get some idea of this breakthrough we might again compare the psyche (consciousness) to a circular piece of paper where the original center was the ego. With this sudden breakthrough we now have an empty hole in the center of ourselves; instead of the ego or self-center, we now have a divine-center—the empty hole. The empty center is two things at once; it is the absence of self and the presence of the divine. There is no self-center anymore; there is only a divine-center. We might visualize this arrangement as a doughnut: consciousness or self is the bread that experiences an empty center in itself. From here on consciousness or self will be egoless. Obviously there has been a radical change of consciousness; there has been an upheaval to which we have no choice but to acclimate.

Many people see this change or upheaval as a process of transformation, but I see it as a process of acclimating to a divine center. Consciousness has not been changed into anything; rather, a chunk of consciousness or self has permanently fallen away. The divine increases as self decreases or falls away; this is the way it works. Self or consciousness is never transformed into the divine; it never “becomes” divine. If we knew the true nature of consciousness we would know this was impossible. The major problem with the notion of transformation is that it forever hangs on to some form of self and never lets it go. It perpetuates the notion that self gets better and better, more and more divine, when in truth, the divine increases in proportion as the self decreases or falls away. The notion of a divinized self only increases or inflates the self; for those who buy into this notion, the journey may well end in total disillusionment.

Freddie’s emphasis.

From What is Self?

7 thoughts to “Bernadette Roberts’s assessment of Anadi”

  1. Thank you for the post Freddie. It took me to the realization site and her books, the first of which,”experience of no self”, is something I was looking for.
    Rafael and you had recommended “living by the words of Bhagavan” in an earlier post. I bought that, read it (beautiful book) and then was wondering if anyone has described the final experiences.
    Bernadette’s is one of those books, and it begins with the description of someone who has practiced self abidance for long years. Pretty interesting.

    1. HI Nishant. I think Bernadette is an example of manonasha, loss of self, full enlightenment as it has been understood in the Asian traditions for over a thousand years. In a series of three books she tried very hard to describe this state or condition as precisely as she should. The difficulty of this task is shown by the fact that Bernadette thought nobody had ever described this state in writing before! Of course many people had done so, but she couldn’t recognize this. Some people conclude from this that she was confused or stupid but I don’t think that’s the proper conclusion. I think the proper conclusion is that all of these descriptions are so ambiguous, so hard to understand, that even an intelligent person like Bernadette who knew the experience first hand couldn’t recognize other people’s attempts to describe it.

      Related to this, I think, is the fact that the Internet is filled with thousands of people trying to figure out who is the “deepest” spiritual teacher, the “most” enlightened, etc. The sites that rank gurus with one to five stars are examples of this. But what criterion do they use? What is the ruler by which they measure “deep” and “most enligtened”?

      The real question should be, “Which spiritual teachers are examples of manonasha?” But almost none of these seekers ask, “Who is an example of manonasha?” They’ve never heard of manonasha. They don’t know what enlightenment really is. They don’t asks, “Is this person free? Is this person at peace?”

      They don’t understand that spiritual freedom is freedom from having to worry about “myself.”

      Bernadette’s books can be very helpful in understanding this.

      If nothing else, the average seeker might benefit from noticing that for roughly twenty years, Bernadette was enlightened and awake by Internet standards. And then something astonishing and unexpected happened that dwarfed everything else: The real enlightenment.

      1. You are right, it IS a little hard to understand what enlightenment is. Most people’s idea of enlightenment/spirituality is some concept imagined by the mind. And since most people have never experienced what it is to be without a mind, I guess it takes a little time to understand.

  2. I’m always baffled by this situation in teachers and curious to learn more about it.
    This was very helpful, as always.
    Thank you!

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