Adi Da Samraj (1939-2008) was a writer, artist, and philosopher, and the founder of the new spiritual tradition of Adidam. Born in Queens, New York, he graduated from Columbia University with a degree in philosophy, and received his Master of Arts in English literature from Stanford University, where he participated in Wallace Stegner’s creative writing program. His master’s thesis, a study of core issues in modernism, focused on the literary experiments of Gertrude Stein and on the modernist painters of the same period. During his lifetime, more than 70 of his books were published—a large body of literary, philosophical, and practical writings of unique significance. They have been praised by such luminaries as Alan Watts, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the artist Alex Grey, and the poet Robert Lax, who said of Adi Da Samraj’s novel The Mummery Book (the first volume of the Orpheum trilogy): “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.” Adi Da is also an internationally recognized visual artist, whose work was exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale, as well as in galleries and art shows in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London, Amsterdam and at the Bargello National Museum in Florence, Italy.