Here’s a passage from Adi Da Samraj:

“People talk about a ‘new paradigm’ – but, all the while, they are actually being the old paradigm…There is no new paradigm until you, yourself, are Awakened…There is no new paradigm until the old paradigm is dead – ‘ground zero’.

All clinging to old ideas is clinging to the old paradigm…As long as people persist in the old paradigm, they are persisting in ‘tribalized’ ego-culture. No matter how they modify their words to sound otherwise, ‘tribalized’ ego-culture is still what they are about.

All of that is finished. It is just that most people have not noticed yet that it is finished.

It is completely finished. It is completely irrelevant and done…The past pattern of humankind is finished. The past pattern of humankind must be shed.It is not that the past pattern of humankind must merely be ended, with nothing replacing it. Rather, the past pattern of humankind must be replaced by That Which Is Supreme – That Which Is Divine. A whole and new global culture and order of humankind must be born from this “ground zero”.

What does that mean, “the old paradigm is dead – ‘ground zero’”? I used to think the order of the world had ended when, say, my favorite barista at my local coffee shop quit working there. Her name was Grace. Grace played music in the coffee shop like the entire album of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, including the severely non-foot-tapping, second side. Grace might follow this with the Stranglers…the Stranglers! You could see some of the customers scratching their heads at JJ Burnel’s raw, lascivious bass lines.

The barista who replaced her was a wiry, robotic man with a goatee who played music that was bad in ways that I did not know existed. Imagine if Phish, Chuck Mangione, Blues Traveler, the Grateful Dead, and Yanni were all jamming on stage together for hours. On acid. Or if Hootie and the Blowfish tried their hands at 1970’s jazz-fusion. This was full-on, military-grade psi-ops stuff.  

So that, for me, was an example of the destruction of the old order of civilization. 

Another example of the past pattern of humankind disintegrating was if that very same coffee shop had run out of my favorite green tea, the stoically subtle if not downright austere Jade Cloud, making me instead have to suffer with the flouncy gaudiness of Jasmine green tea, a tea so floral it might as well come with a hoop dress from the wardrobe department of Gone with the Wind for me to wear while I sipped it.

For a long time, those were the biggest crises in my life. Those were the kinds of things that used to signal the death of the old order of things. But then the covid-19 thing happened, and the world closed up shop, and my job got eaten up by a stupid corona retrovirus, and I was trapped in our tiny home with our two millennial neighbors, Ashley and Rachel, cranking shitty corporate dance music beneath our apartment floor all day, “nnthump, nnthump, nnthump.”

Then the police here in Minneapolis tortured and murdered an innocent man named George Floyd just eight blocks from our home, triggering a huge and pretty magnificent uprising of the people. This sensitized me, on an entirely new level, to the fact that black people in this country are systematically terrorized, murdered, and hideously oppressed on a scale that I’d only hazily suspected, until there were military Humvees – as well as SUVs full of neo-Nazis with tidily-trimmed beards – rolling through my neighborhood, while Apache helicopters chopped up the air – whap, whap, whap – right above my home, and a bunch of nights were full of smoke, explosions, gunfire, shrieking sirens, and flash-bang grenades. Also the days, at least two of them, were full of us and everyone else on our block hosing down dumpsters, wooden fences, and garbages, because the neo-Nazis in SUVs like to set them on fire.

So all of that caught my attention. 

Aha, thought I, it is much more likely that these sorts of happenings are the real signs of the death of the old order that Adi Da Samraj is talking about. This inspired me explore what white people who spend their lives sitting like little sultans in hip coffee shops without any policemen torturing and murdering them could do to help. It turned out there were many things to do to help. I’d always believed, idiotically, that just thinking racists were fucking idiots was enough. It is not. Here, for one example, is a handy article offering 75 specific things I could do. Bonus: I can do a bunch of them right from my coffee shop.

Then I began to marvel at how oblivious I’ve been about other forms of suffering in the world. This world. My world. Everyone’s world. The people of Palestine. The child sex slave industry. Syrian refugees. On and On. Never mind the unimaginable magnitude of death and suffering we are hurtling toward from environmental catastrophes and climate change. I rather suspect that each of these have their own lists of 75 things we can do and should do. That’s a lot of lists of 75 things we can do and should do. 

How to prioritize? I’ve been finding this to be an overwhelming question. But if we must be overwhelmed by a question, this is probably the right one to be overwhelmed by. There are countless people who do not have the opulent luxury of weighing such questions because they are too busy being starved, raped, wrongly imprisoned, or murdered.

Takeaway

Adi Da Samraj says that existence is arising in what he calls Prior Unity. The sense I get is that, the more we are lived and breathed by this Prior Unity, the more our actions will be guided by the spontaneous, intuitive, perfect, Innate Intelligence of that Prior Unity. 

The go-to metaphor, at least in my mind, is the human body. When the integrity of the whole and all its systems of communication are functioning (the energy field and so on) all the cells “know” exactly what to do to create and maintain health. Similarly, feeling and knowing our Prior Unity – directly, non-verbally – would guide our activism. 

Why does Adi Da call it Prior Unity? What does he mean by “prior?” He means that it’s “always already the case.” And that, in turn, means that it cannot be “worked toward.” Fortunately or unfortunately, you can’t strategically strive for Prior Unity. How can you strive for a condition that is always already the case? 

I think maybe all we can do is start to notice this alleged Prior Unity.

And begin to discover what we are doing to not notice it.

One way I avoid the reality of Prior Unity is by thinking this: “Yeah, yeah, yeah – unity, oneness, non-duality. I know all about that stuff. Big fan. Read about it since I was a kid. Been there, done that.” Obviously this is ludicrous. I have not the slightest idea what Prior Unity is. I have neither “been there” nor “done” anything remotely like “that.” The truth is that, deep down, beneath my bookish concepts, my real presumption is that there is no such thing as Prior Unity. Not in a way that actually changes anything. And this presumption makes it impossible for me to notice it.

In one of Larry Dossey’s books he describes these indigenous people who lived on an island. Somehow, they had managed to never invent a boat. Just didn’t need one, I guess. Also, having not had contact with other peoples, they’d never even seen a boat. Or anything vaguely boat-esque. The whole platonic template of “boat” didn’t exist in their consciousness. Therefore, Dossey said, when a big European boat showed up off their shores one day, the island natives literally couldn’t see it. Like until it was ridiculously close. All but looming nautically over them.

Now I don’t know how big the ship was or how close it supposedly had to get before the islanders could perceive the damn thing. Obviously at a certain point the whole anecdote starts to attrit plausibility badly. But apparently it was a real phenomenon. 

Point being it’s evidently very hard to perceive something if you’ve never allowed for that thing to exist. So maybe it’s possible to open, in a new and real way, to the strange possibility that there really might be an imponderable Oneness, a Prior Unity, that, if known, would irrevocably change our lives and actions. On the other hand, check out this Adi Da passage right here:

“Through the “play” of your life, you must demonstrate the taking on of the suffering of everybody, the conditions of everybody. You must always maintain your sympathy. You must always be free of the tendency to separate from “others”. All (including you) are part of the same pattern of totality. Therefore, in Truth, and in Reality, there is no individual (or separate and “personal”) pattern of conditional happening and tendency…. there is no “private destiny”, there is no“personal righteousness”. All are involved in the same reality – together and individually.”

Adi Da Samraj

Something about that actually sounds a little scary. I mean, “…demonstrate the taking on of the suffering of everybody, the conditions of everybody…”? Wait, what? Gulp. And that raises a discomforting possibility. Maybe the real reason I don’t allow myself to notice – really notice – this Prior Unity, is that…who knows where it would lead? 

The punch line may be that, while we wonder if there’s “any such thing” as Prior Unity, the realization of Prior Unity apparently reveals that there’s “no such thing” as us! For more excellent knee-slappers like that, make sure and subscribe to this scrumptious blog! Also, leave a comment, for goodness sake. Say hi.