NOT-TWO IS PEACE

The message of Not-Two Is Peace is not merely that human beings should work to resolve the world’s urgent crises, but that we must do so in a radically new way. At its core, this book is a call to uncover an entirely new disposition within ourselves, a fundamentally different consciousness, from which to engage the grave global challenges arrayed before us.

The striking notion put forth in this book is that what humanity must now grow beyond is nothing less than the fundamental orientation of searching for solutions to the world’s problems. Adi Da’s core argument is that the orientation of trying to find or create unity and peace out of all the divided interests of separate groups of people is “not it”—and is, in fact, no longer workable. Rather, what humankind desperately needs today is a profoundly new paradigm, which is summarized here as the principle—and working-presumption—of “prior unity”.

Prior unity is not just a philosophical concept or ideal. It is the structure of existence itself, as ancient seers have declared and even modern physics has demonstrated. To experience and presume prior unity obviates the search to “cause” or “create” unity or peace. The work becomes one of enacting and magnifying the prior unity that is already the felt reality. It is to enable the inherent prior unity of people to come forth on all levels of the world stage. It is a profoundly different context within which to work.

The practical means proposed by Adi Da for manifesting this prior unity is a “Global Cooperative Forum”. This forum would serve the common interests of all of humankind, because it would operate on the basis of the new paradigm of prior unity, which would grant it a unique and inherent moral integrity.

All the fundamental global matters would be in its purview, but approached as one living process, rather than as a multiplicity of competing issues. Participation in the forum would depend upon people’s ability to set aside their personal, national, religious, ethnic, or other forms of identity, to accomplish the work at hand. The paradigm of prior unity would grant them the capacity to merely be there as human beings representing all of humankind.

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From his birth (on Long Island, New York, in 1939), Adi Da always manifested unique signs of spiritual illumination. Nevertheless, from his birth, and until his spiritual restoration at thirty years of age, Adi Da submitted himself to an ordeal of “self-identification” with all the limitations and sufferings of the human condition.

Adi Da describes his early years as being focused in two fundamental activities: investigating how, in the scale of human “ordinariness”, to perfectly realize the Truth of “Reality Itself”, and (coincidentally) both achieving and demonstrating the human-scale ability to communicate the Truth of “Reality Itself” through both visual and verbal means.

Adi Da graduated from Columbia University in 1961, with a BA in philosophy, and from Stanford University in 1966, with an MA in English literature. 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.

In 1964, Adi Da began a period of intensive practice under a succession of spiritual masters in the United States and India. In 1968, he went to India and approached the renowned spiritual master Swami Muktananda of Ganeshpuri, who immediately responded by saying that Adi Da was a spiritual master at birth, and “the most extra- ordinary Westerner” he (Swami Muktananda) had ever encountered. One year later, in a unique letter of acknowledgement, Swami Muktananda made an open public declaration that Adi Da, by virtue of his evident spiritual signs and demonstrated states, was inherently qualified to teach others independently, and to awaken others spiritually by direct transmission.

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The World-Friend Adi Da

In the following essay from the book, the World-Friend Adi Da describes the ongoing confrontation between competing groups of all kinds as the “stave in the wheels” of the inherently “self-organizing, self-correcting, and self-rightening” nature of the human world system. This “stave”, Adi Da says, is “actively preventing the force of the whole from emerging”:

Unless they are specifically prevented from doing so, all systems will spontaneously righten themselves. The universe is a self-organizing, self-correcting, and self-rightening process. All systems are self-organizing, self-correcting, and self-rightening—unless something interferes with the self-organizing, self-correcting, and self-rightening process. The current power-structures in the human world are actually preventing the self-organizing, self-correcting, and self-rightening process of

humankind from happening.

The political, social, economic, and cultural patterning (and hierarchy of expectations and demands) of collective human life-systems is organized in the likeness (and by an extension) of the functions of the human brain and nervous system.

The human brain and nervous system is, characteristically, patterned to allow (and to seek, and to reward) a limited range of possible experiences and possible forms of knowledge—and the human brain and nervous system is also, characteristically, patterned to avoid (and to prevent, and even to punish) experiences and forms of knowledge that are not within the otherwise limited range of allowable (and, thus, seekable and rewardable) experiences and forms of knowledge.

Thus, and likewise, and by extension, all collective human political, social, economic, and cultural life-systems are (in accordance with the particular “personality profile” of the particular system in each case) strictly organized to allow (and to purpose, and to reward) only certain limited possibilities of experience and knowledge, and, otherwise, to disallow (and to restrictively prevent, and to punish) all possibilities of experience and knowledge that do not correspond to the designs of the particular case of human collectivity.

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