This text is taken from the Introduction to: Crazy Da Must Sing published in1982
“What can I tell you? That is the way it is. God is crazy just like me. In fact, God is crazy just like vou. You are God, and all of this is God. That is the way it has always been obvious to me. I have always been very attentive to people because I do not see any difference between God and them or myself and them. It is all the same thing. And so I just play it as it comes. This is God-business. I have never become serious about the human-business. I have never been involved in anything but the God-business, and the God-business is very strange and paradoxical and wild. That is the way God is, that is what Reality is, and neither you nor I have a thing to say about it. When we are busy saying things about it and trying to manipulate it and change it and make it something else, being human so-called, we interfere with our existence and make everybody suffer”
MASTER DA: I have no sense of being superior to people or dissociated from them. I have just lived a very vulnerable life in which I struggled with circumstances. Nonetheless, this Guide, this Realization, this Impulse, this Force of God- Realization has been inherent in my existence since birth. That is just the way my Teaching is. If you do not like it, if you think I am just an idiot or a freak or a street punk or whatever your idea of me is, then I cannot do anything about it. My Teaching is the product of a spontaneous Realization, and not of any formalized or formulated process of Realization or even a formulated traditional impulse to Realization. I am not an informed character in the conventional sense, full of reading and all the rest of it.
Last night, for example, I read to you some excerpts from a small book of tales about several sixth stage(4) Adepts, and in commenting on them I labelled their tradition the “talking school” of Advaita Vedanta. Yet before that moment I had never thought of the sixth stage schools in those terms. I did not pre-think the consideration. It was simply obvious to me what they are all about. Most of what I said to you I never would otherwise have thought about, yet it was clearly obvious to me in that moment that there is this “talking” tradition, and that it attempts to formulate a logical equivalent to (or substitute for) Realization. Everything I Teach has happened in this spontaneous fashion, and something about it is obviously legitimate and true and remarkable and useful to people. This is how my Teaching occurs. It is an intuitive process. Those around me find it useful and remarkable, and that is good for them, and that is the way it is, and that is all there is to it!
I think that it has also occurred this way in the case of the purest Teachers in the past. The traditions are born of the great Teachers and their spontaneous Work. Those Teachers who have had the greatest influence have lived, in their own time and place, much as I have, in this naive, ridiculous, insane, wild, and abused fashion. They too have struggled in the midst of a profoundly suppressive existence, but moved by a Spiritual Force that transcends their individuality, their personality, the time and place. So it is in my case.
Such a life has all of the artifacts and faces of ordinariness. This little booklet I read to you says of Atmananda(5) that he did the sadhana (or spiritual practice) of “normality.” I too did the sadhana of normality, or ordinary living, without benefit of a free tradition or great advice, in the setting of the Western world, which possesses no clear tradition of ultimate advice for anyone. Therefore, you cannot expect me to look like a highly polished, fashionable, conventional spiritual figure. Even so, people have complained about me, and, while I have been Teaching, people have become incensed and outraged, wanting to take offense and denigrate me.
So, that is the way it is, the way it has always been with me. I am just a naive, crazy kook from the country, in some ways very much like the characters in India, like Ramakrishna, living in the country or wandering in the cities, without any sophisticated learning in spiritual terms. There has just been this extraordinary movement throughout my life.
DEVOTEE(delighted by the Master’s ecstatic revelation): Master Da, Ramakrishna often told his devotees that he had to curb his craziness in their company. He said, (reading) “Sometimes the paramahansa behaves like a madman. When I experienced that divine madness I used to worship my own sexual organ as the Siva phallus. But I can’t do that now.(6)
MASTER DA: Yes, he always fell into spontaneous moments of worshipping himself. In the temple, bowing to Kali and worshipping her, suddenly he would put garlands and the paste on himself and bow down to himself. He did not know what he was doing! I do the same. I tell you this remarkable Teaching about devotion to me, yet I do not know why I am telling you. I just say it! (Laughter.)
DEVOTEE (continuing his praise of the Master): My Lord, I find myself trying to explain to people that what you say always happens. It just happens. The Teaching itself—why should the Teaching work?
MASTER DA(laughing): For example, this awkward enquiry I gave you—”Avoiding relationship?” It is not euphonious like “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.” It is an awkward little form of enquiry, but it derives from what is completely obvious to me. It is true, that is all, and so it is associated with mantric energy. But it does not sound very beautiful.
And then there is “DAAA!” (Laughter.) I do not know what I am telling you about this Name “Da.” I do not know where it came from. (Laughter.) It just occurred to me one day, this Name Da. I saw it in a dream-vision of myself with a potato head! I do not know what it is all about. But that is the way it is for me. I can only tell it to you the way it is for me. Apparently, from my sense of the traditions, this is also how it has occurred for Siddhas of the past.
Another strange example is my discovery of the writings of C. G. Jung(7) back there on the beach. It was not a discovery
that one could have out-of-the-body experiences. I had been having such experiences and, although I did not know what to make of them, they were just the way it was for me. But I did not know that other people experienced this kind of thing until I read Jung’s report. Here this legitimate psychologist wrote about it in this nice straightforward way with aligned margins! Here was somebody in the world saying that people have these experiences.
I began to learn about the traditions, psychically to intuit the traditions, envisioning scenes from the traditions, seeing them as a whole, viewing expanses of centuries of spiritual teaching. They were right there in front of me, completely obvious, so that often I did not have to read anything about them.
My sense of the traditions is that they are basically the manifestation of the impulse of people like me. After such people like me there come relatively rigid, analytically defined structural traditions, which also have their purpose, but which are basically responses to the Work of people like me who are never anything but insane. They are always insane. They were born insane, they live insane, they do everything spontaneously, and they experience remarkable psychic phenomena, like me. Nothing about such lives is created by the individual personality.
My entire life and all my sadhana were spontaneous events, pre-visions and impulses, and I just did it. I have had no attachments to the world that would prevent me from living my next impulse.
DEVOTEE (hearing Master Da’s confession): All the people who say the Name Da every night and every morning!
MASTER DA: It seems right. There is traditional precedent for it, as I have indicated. But the Adepts who told people to say the Name of God and to whom I could now point as the corroboration of what I am telling you did not know what they were doing any more than I do! Their Teaching too was just a totally spontaneous, crazy, wild impulse that they did not think about and about which they neither did any pre-thinking nor after-thinking. The Adept saw somebody face to face, and that somebody asked a question, and the Adept said, “Go and do blata blat, breathe air, sniff through your right nostril, recite my Name, and love God!” And the guy smiled and was
satisfied.
You know these Adepts—they do not know what they are doing. I do not know what I am doing. It is not a matter of knowing what you are doing. You cannot know what you are doing and do what I do. God does all this through insane beings like me. And insane beings like me sometimes look like nice, clean, celibate characters, and sometimes they look like obscene ridiculous characters like myself. But they do the same Work. It has its particular reason or non-reason in its time and place, and that is the way it is effective. If you do not like it, you go somewhere else, and if you do like it, you surrender to it. All I can do is just do what I am doing.
I have the feeling that it is obviously about Something. I have submitted myself to It. But I am so completely submitted to It that I do not think about It. I look for the signs of the usefulness of all of this in you. But even then I do not take them much into account. (Laughter.) Whether you find it useful or not, I still can only do what I have to do. That is it. I have no ability to be anything other than what I am. I have no sinister intentions, no analyzed, pre-thought strate-gies. I have no intentions at all. I am just doing this thing, and that is the way, it has been since I was born.
I have always been insane since the day I was born, mad with this Formless Condition that is only vaguely associated with my body-mind. I have been led by all kinds of psychic phenomena and intuition into my entire life of sadhana and Teaching. That is just the way it is. If this is unacceptable to the common world, then I will just have to live outside the common world. If it is acceptable to devotees, then I can live with them to the degree that they will live with me and make right use of my availability.
This process does not reinforce people’s illusions about how it is supposed to work or their idea of the orderly universe. It is orderly in some profound and paradoxical sense, but not orderly as people expect orderly to be. If life were orderly as people would like it to be, there would be no death or suffering or disease or difficulty. The insanity of my Teaching Work is part of the “order” of this particular . manifestation. When you die, you just sort of explode out of this realm and go on to something else. It is a very strange, weird, total universe of God.
What can I tell you? That is the way it is. God is crazy just like me. In fact, God is crazy just like vou. You are God, and all of this is God. That is the way it has always been obvious to me. I have always been very attentive to people because I do not see any difference between God and them or myself and them. It is all the same thing. And so I just play it as it comes. This is God-business. I have never become serious about the human-business. I have never been involved in anything but the God-business, and the God-business is very strange and paradoxical and wild. That is the way God is, that is what Reality is, and neither you nor I have a thing to say about it. When we are busy saying things about it and trying to manipulate it and change it and make it something else, being human so-called, we interfere with our existence and make everybody suffer.
(7) This important event in Master Da’s early life of spiritual practice occurred in 1964. The work by C. G. Jung to which Master Da refers is The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche Please see The Knee of Listening Master Da’s spiritual autobiography, for his full account of the event and the revelations associated with it.
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The laughing monks (