Adi Da was born in New York, in 1939. The author of over seventy five books, he has lived in Fiji since 1983 and is a Fijian citizen.

Throughout his early childhood, Adi Da enjoyed a state of extraordinary spiritual illumination. At a very early point in his life, he intentionally relinquished that state, in order learn the cause of human suffering and the way to go beyond it.

Thus, Adi Da Samraj describes his early years as being focused in two fundamental activities: investigating how to realize truth, and developing the ability to communicate that truth through artistic means (both visual and literary).

Adi Da graduated from Columbia University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy, and from Stanford University in 1966, with an MA in English literature. His master's thesis, a study of core issues in modernism, focused on Gertrude Stein and painte

rs of the same period.

In 1964, he began a period of practice under a succession of spiritual masters in the United States and India. Six years later (after a final period of intense spiritual endeavor), Adi Da was re-established in the freedom of the illumined condition he had known in his earliest life.

In the years since, Adi Da has created a large body of spiritual writings, and is widely recognized as one of the most significant spiritual masters living today. In the early 1970s, Alan Watts, writer of numerous books on religion and philosophy, acknowledged Adi Da as "a rare being", adding, "It is obvious, from all sorts of subtle details, that he knows what IT's all about."

In the late 1990s, poet Robert Lax said of The Mummery Book, "Living and working as a writer for many decades, I have not encountered a book like this, that mysteriously and unselfconsciously conveys so much of the Unspeakable Reality."

In The Orpheum trilogy - comprising The Mummery Book, The Scapegoat Book, and The Happenine Book - Adi Da has created a body of literature that is vast in its depth and profundity, humor and tragedy.

Ultimately, all thirty-six hours of this trilogy will be theatrically enacted. The Mummery Book, at 8 hours in length, is the first of these books, and is already being acclaimed by literary and theatrical professionals to be a completely remarkable and unique theatre experience, incorporating not only Adi Da's exquisite writing but also over 700 images of his acclaimed artwork (currently on exhibit as part of the 2007 Venice Biennale).