Inspiration and Founder

The founder of the Sacred Camel Gardens, and Fear-No-More Zoo, Adi Da Samraj, was born on Long Island, New York, in 1939. The adventures of Adi Da’s life as a baby, a boy, and a young man were informed, he says, by a profound spiritual intuition and impulse to realize the source of all things. As a small boy he spoke of his heart-impulse to save the world.

Much of Adi Da’s life-story is recorded in his autobiography, The Knee Of Listening.

Avatar Adi Da’s first spiritual teacher was a Maine Coon cat he named Robert. They lived together on the Pacific Coast in Tunitas, California, in the mid-1960s.

Adi Da said of 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.

Years later, on The Mountain Of Attention Sanctuary in Northern California, Adi Da created a protected sacred site he called Holy Cat Grotto.  A handsome bronze statue of Robert was cemented in place on a ledge of the small cliff directly above the rocky grotto. Robert’s ashes, which Adi Da had carried since his first Teacher passed away, were installed there.

Adi Da said that it was none other than Robert who first called him by the name “Da”.

Adi Da Samraj’s life of spiritual service was entirely given to the wild and rare impulse to inspire the emergence of a new culture of life on earth, one to allow for the integration of all non-human and human cultures into one diverse, seamless, sacred culture.  He said that one of his intentions was to raise every human being’s sensitivity to the reality that everything is conscious, not just humans — rocks, plants, trees, moving creatures, the weather, water, the earth itself — that there is nothing but consciousness, everywhere.

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