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#3409 - Sunday, January 11, 2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
This is from The Institute for Contemporary/Ancient Learning: http://gburneko.blogspot.com/2009/01/review-of-not-two-is-peace.html
Book Review by Guy Burneko, Ph.D.
The Institute for Contemporary/Ancient Learning
Seattle, WA
January 8, 2009
Adi Da. Not-Two Is Peace: The Ordinary People’s Way
of Global Cooperative Order. Middletown, CA: Dawn Horse
Press, 2007.
This book is valuable in so many ways that writing a review of it
is a pleasure; its limitations are only the result of its
considerable virtues.
It elucidates in diverse ways the immense value of profound
nondualist experience for humane and ecohumane well-being. And
while in doing so it does not rely on scholarly references,
anyone who has encountered traditional teachings of the inherent
unity of being from the Vedas, Sutras, mystics or indigenous
sources will recognize basic similarities in concept and import.
For instance, where we read in Adi Da that “The restoration
of sanity and Truth – or the restoration to Reality Itself
– requires the overcoming of the ‘self’-deluded
process. . . of ‘self-objectification,’” we hear
echoes of ancient teachings about the avidya or ignorance that
obscures and deludes our understanding (of ourselves as
essentially not-twoed from “prior unity”). Our
ignorance, he explains, is in thinking of ourselves as separate
egos which, therefore, in turn objectify All as something
separate from ourselves. From this derive the
"tribalisms," competitiveness, fears and lack in peace
and composure that afflict our unsustainable lives. Our
presumption of individual ego eclipses the basic Self-realization
that we are, finally, non-individually selfless in (and as) the
not-two of never-completely-objectifiable “Reality Itself.”
Adi Da is both clear and tonic in showing the extent to which the
contemporary “world is deluded by its own artifacts”
and that we continuously blind ourselves to the fact that “the
egoless human being fully participates in Reality Itself” by
our persistently assuming that we do not do so via our repeated
“egoic” assertions. In other words, it is in assuming
and instantiating the unity of the reality that is prior to all
egoing (rather than assuming duality in our interpersonal and
geopolitical interactions) that we embody Reality. “Egolessness
is the self-organizing energy of prior unity.” We have put
the cart of separateness before the horse of not-two.
One miscue in the development of Da’s thinking may be in
using the term “individuation” to accentuate the
confrontational hyper-individualism of contemporary social
psychology. Compare his criticism of it with Jung’s richly
developed use of the term individuation to characterize a process
of psychospiritual “integration” of opposites tending
towards what Adi Da himself seems to propose. Consider also that
characters and images in dream, myth and ritual drama often
provide useful bridges for understanding how competing opposites
reveal as well as conceal a manifold coincidentia oppositorum, or
marriage of opposites. Examples are in the reciprocities of
yinyang or in the unconditioned unity behind the battling armies
of Bhagavadgita where Krishna, in the form of a charioteer,
reminds us to “be free of the pairs of opposites. Poise
[our] mind in tranquility . . .Be established in the
consciousness of the Atman, always.”
Attempting to clarify the self-presencing of undivided
Reality-experience, what Adi Da calls “prior unity,” i.
e., the unity that is “senior” to everything that we
usually experience as divided into us and them, this and that,
pro and con, and all the exaggerated brouhaha of the “daily
news,” he devises tactics of language, (including
punctuation and capitalization). These are briefly distracting,
but in no case is his use of language ambiguous or unclear. Such
a statement as that: “Love Is The Inherent (and, thus,
moment to moment) Transcending of the separate ‘subject’
(or the egoic and divisive ‘self’) and the separate
‘object’ (or the illusory ‘not-self’)”
would by itself be a show-stopper. But the book explains its use
of novel forms of expression, provides a glossary and an astute
introduction by Ervin Laszlo, and the reader is made familiar
with terms as they arise. So the overall experience is one of
thinking together with and, gradually, as genuinely seminal
being-consciousness – sometimes in tradition signified by
sat-chit-ananda.
It is not initially easy, if ever easy, to bespeak indivisible
prior unity in a world of mind and speech that is everywhere
premised on ego-born duality and the dramas of often antagonistic
multiplicities. As Zhuangzi suggests, there is the One, then
there is somebody, and then that somebody is saying something
about that One—which makes three; already the calculations
are adding up fast. Again, however, we need to read Adi Da not
foremost as an “author” or as a “writer,” and
far less as an academic, but as an expression of a presumably
integral consciousness that is often eclipsed by the divisiveness
of “Narcissistic holocaust” in our “dark time.”
Adi Da gets right to work, in a “no nonsense. . . .only
business handled” way forgoing the humor, irony, fun and
sweet affection we find in the writings of such illuminated ones
as Zhuangzi or Hafiz. In fact, as incontrovertibly valuable as
Adi Da’s teaching is here, its exposition is sometimes nigh
unto hieratic, even pontifical. And this is especially so when
his apostrophe is to “you” (meaning you, me, the
readers) as if he were not also one among us: “You -- the
people of the world. Every one of ‘Everyman’ must be
changed, and restored to the non-dissociative circumstance. . . .”
There is nothing offensive about this kind of address, and in its
didactic or even hortatory context it is understandable. But
neither, even though written in the name of compassion, does it
savor of the inclusive love of, say, the self-deprecating Hafiz
who writes to a similar end: “To your deepest sensibilities
my Beloved has asked Hafiz to sing with all of my millstone’s
talents.” The univocity of Avatar Adi Da Samraj sometimes
verges on that of the Abrahamic traditions he not unreasonably
critiques.
Yet “World-Friend” Adi Da offers real gifts of
trenchancy and camaraderie in his work to help us grow “to
relinquish the ego-principle and to embrace the
Prior-Unity-Principle” and become politically free. “To
be thus grown is, itself, to be (inherently) politically free.”
And a major way to this is through our “intimate cooperation”
in effecting locally, and also -- notably via internet resources
-- a “Global Cooperative Forum” for the future conduct
of life on earth. This “does not require disassociation from
one’s nation, one’s birthplace, or one’s
particular citizenship. Rather, it requires the discipline of
always exercising a disposition that, fundamentally, transcends
any kind of particularity of orientation.” It is thinking
and living in terms of all of us, not just of the ego, clan,
state or other corporate body we have divided ourselves into.
“The disposition of always (and inherently) being part of
humankind first implies a kind of egolessness.” “Cooperation
and tolerance” accompany this, “the necessary ‘new
paradigm’ for the human design of future effort,” and
the necessary, ensuing peace. The author also alludes to the
practical value of contemplative practices, generically
meditative or, as appropriate, “esoteric,” for a
widespread pedagogy of “self-organizing” peace and
world justice.
The egolessness we learn of is devoid of the high drama of our
usual knee-jerk assertions, national and individual, of I, me and
mine as if these were not “always already” one with,
and as, you and yours in the ecology of mind and nature. Absent
the agon of adversarial concupiscence and violence, the no-drama
politique of a Global Cooperative Forum convokes a mode of global
community organization. It is refreshingly reminiscent of the
cadences of “No Drama Obama” and the emerging global
mystique of new age aloha. Adi Da writes from Fiji; you don’t
need a weatherman to know which way the Pacific wind blows.
I haven’t in a long time read a book that hits so many
nondual nails on the head so neatly, to make a bad analogy. There
were parts of this work that, in the words of a classical Chinese
scholar-sage, made me so happy I felt like I was “dancing
with my hands and feet.” There were a few where I sensed a
suppressed rancor. It is well worth reading twice, and deserves a
place on both public and university library shelves. I recommend
it highly with the qualification that it requires concentration
and patient attentiveness. It offers a diagnosis and remedy for a
world culture of peaceless “mummery” and violence.
Google offers multiple references to Adi Da (some problematic,
some giving different names he has used, e. g., Da Free John);
and the book itself directs interested readers to ispeace723.org
In addition to texts and thinkers mentioned here, interested
readers might also appreciate: Jean Gebser’s Ever-Present
Origin, Sri Aurobindo’s The Future Evolution of Man, David
Loy’s Nonduality, N. K. Girardot’s Myth and Meaning in
Early Taoism, Thomas Berry’s Dream of the Earth, Mary Evelyn
Tucker and Duncan Ryuken Williams,’ eds. Buddhism and
Ecology, Beatrice Bruteau’s Evolution toward Divinity, Peter
D. Hershock’s Liberating Intimacy, Ervin Laszlo’s The
Connectivity Hypothesis, Charles Le Blanc’s Huai-Nan Tzu,
Gray Kocchar-Lindgren's Narcissus Transformed or William Blake’s
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Namaste
Book Review by Guy Burneko, Ph.D.
The Institute for Contemporary/Ancient Learning
Seattle, WA
January 8, 2009 http://gburneko.blogspot.com/2009/01/review-of-not-two-is-peace.html