“Everybody is like an archaeological site…each individual is possessed of very complex ‘subjectivity’ that is made of archaic moments of adaptation. When confronted by the circumstances of life, you resort – at random, very primitively and very automatically – to these ‘solutions’…”
“Memory is just an impulse to dramatize a certain archaic disposition. Thus, you are always thinking and remembering: ‘This looks like that. That looks like that. This reminds me of that.’…”
—Adi Da Samraj
On any given day, I see in myself endless examples of what Adi Da is talking about here. For instance, this morning, before I even meditated, I shuffled up to my computer to check my email. I craved the notorious dopamine hit. This was basically a reenactment of my adolescent self, craving hits of good feeling from my legendary electric bong with its badass, gatling, one-hit bowl.
A little later in the morning I was making our smoothies, swirling around my kitchen, tossing exotic substances into our blender, like a mad, health-nut, Sufi dervish. As always, I thrilled inside imagining the shocking health benefits these substances would confer upon me and my wife and pretty much any carbon-based organisms within a two-mile radius of us.
In this case, I was recapitulating my boyhood obsession with comic books. In my mind, each magical element I threw in the blender was essentially a Marvel superhero. The antioxidants from the amla powder zoomed through my wife’s and my body in gleaming yellow costumes, zapping hapless free-radicals. The chlorophyll of the chlorella looked like the Hulk, glowing with bright healing green light, blasting life-giving oxygen into our cells.
Last example. With our US presidential election just three days away, I can easily lapse into fear about what might happen. I don’t need to enumerate the dark and heinous things that could transpire with a Trump victory. They are all obviously very real.
At the same time, whenever my mind imagines those awful scenarios, there is a highly specific way my nervous system lights up. It is precisely the circuitry that lit up when I was a boy, anticipating my alcoholic father’s next explosion of rage. When I get into fear about this election, it feels exactly the same, in my body, as my terror of him used to feel. Exactly the same. In both cases, my amygdala shrieks that a colossal psychotic force out there is going to annihilate me. The Guru again:
“When you are at your weakest, or when circumstances impinge upon you most heavily…the models (and the impulses to action) of the past take you over. You conform to them, you dramatize or incarnate them, and you find yourself acting as you did at an earlier age. Everybody does that.”
The point is, no matter how scary the actual, real-world possibilities are, what’s going on in me is – unmistakably – a trippy reenactment, an ancient program looping in my body mind. Adi Da goes on to say that:
“Your obligation is to recognize that the entirety of your ‘subjective’ life amounts to nothing but signs of old adaptation, and that is all it is.”
For me, it is wonderful medicine to become more and more aware that I – ordinary everyday “I” – am basically a chaos of old automaticities. Because the more I notice this, the more simply and directly I so-to-speak “repent” of the whole idiot repetition-machine of self. This softens me into whatever Unknowable Mystery it is that Lives and Breathes us. And in that disposition (to whatever degree I allow myself to fall into it), I am certain I will be of much more use to the world and my friends, no matter what happens with this election.
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