Human beings have been in a mental crisis for only a very short period of time. We’ve been around as just-about-complete humans for millions of years. For 80,000 years we’ve been completely “DNA Us” with brains working exactly the way that our brains work today.
For most of that long, long time the way our brains worked fit in with the natural world. One of the reasons for that was because of our ability to tell stories, and to share knowledge through stories.
When we use stories as myth, what we today will call myth, they are actually “true.” Because they work. What a myth does is paints a picture in our full mind. Both sides. What we, today, would call the left brain and the right brain, or all the different nodes of the brain.
These stories create pictures that help us live with each other, live with the world and understand the world.
Living in the Past and Future
It’s an incredibly important function of the human brain to be able to see patterns in the past and put them together to understand what’s going to happen in the future.
Winter’s going to come. We need to store up some food. Someone behaved badly… More than likely that person’s going to behave badly again, unless we know to intervene. Day and night come regularly, and it’s important to know.
So many aspects of being human is because of our ability to remember what happened in the past, put stories to it, and project that into the future. It’s a totally good human thing to be able to do that.
It’s handy to know where we went and where we are going.
When We Got Stuck
What we might call the beginning of our mental crisis was when our stories stopped matching up with our full mind. When we started making excuses for the things we didn’t understand. We started believing un-useful stuff.
I don’t know how to describe it but as civilization grew we started using our stories to make us believe that we weren’t part of the world. We became dominant minded and told stories that we were the dominant species, that we were the ones in charge of the world, that we were the bosses of everything.
That separation created madness. Then the madness, itself, started being in charge. When we started having wealth, and people being bosses of other people, it led to a state of confusion where what’s going on inside of our brain is not useful our mental health.
How Mysticism Helps
Nonduality and Zen teachings are trying to take what has happened inside our imagination of who we are and turn it into something useful.
What Nonduality and Zen teachings are telling us is that we have a mental disease. Something is wrong with the way your brain works, so you can’t trust any of it. You can’t fix a broken mind with broken mental concepts because you will always use these unhealthy stories and dreams to create meaning. The broken pieces don’t fit together so the broken mind creates more and more complicated stories to explain it: dogma. On and on it goes getting more and more complicated.
Lies are Complicated
It’s like when you’re telling a lie. You have to keep all your facts in line in order to continually support the lie. If you mess up the people that you’re lying to are going to start figuring it out. In our mental crises today our brains are full of lies.
Nonduality says: OK, So what do we do? What do we do about this?
It’s the same question for Zen. This is what Buddha was looking for. He realized, “Something’s wrong in my perception, what do I do about it?”
It seems frightening but the solution is actually very very simple. What you have to do is bring yourself to a point of total zero. You have to go, “My brain is not me. My mind is not me. These stories aren’t me. I can’t trust a single one of them.”
You bring yourself down to complete zero, and when you get to the place where you know who you are as completely melded with existence, not identified with the mind not identified with the emotion, then that’s like day one. That’s where you then start being a full human being and can begin to piece it all together.
Perception from Zero
You’ve gone to zero and now you come back and can freely decide. Is it useful to love? Is honesty important? You can examine the stories from a place of freedom.
This is what scientists do. They basically say, OK, here’s the world. We want to figure it out. We start with curiosity. Everything must be a theory to start out with, until it’s proven. And then, as science got more and more complex, they started realizing that you can only prove very few things and everything else remains a probability. Which is really cool because it keeps you in a constantly curious state.
Are Myths Real?
So stories and myths? Think of myths as stories that work within the context of how humans naturally live. But we are dealing with the modern mind, so we need to bring ourselves down to this point of zero, where we will allow ourselves to always go, “Everything’s a theory. Nothing’s fixed.”
Don’t be fixed on things. Then you can start looking at the old stories and decide: Are they useful or not?
One good book that describes this is Braiding Sweetgrass. If you can only read one thing, read the first chapter. In that book, at the very beginning, the author tells the myth of her people, about how Sky Woman came down to Earth. How she got all the plants going on Turtle Island. She compares it to the Christian myth of Eve. How Eve was not even a person, just a rib. And then she was bad and she ate the apple and she got thrown out of Paradise.
In one myth, everybody’s living in paradise and know that they are part of paradise, cooperating and learning. They are not the rulers. Humans are the younger brother, the younger cousin. We are there to learn from all of existence.
In the other story, the one our civilization has been living on, we are the bosses of everything We started out bad anyway. It’s sad to be us in this second story.
Look at those two stories right there, and you can see how one story has us living in harmony and the other one makes us not even a part of the world.
No wonder we have all have mental problems, right?
Techniques for the Mind
Nonduality teachings and Zen stories are so good because they are a science to break through our damaged minds. What they do is take a little scenario and then twist it, almost ended in a joke. These techniques split our illusions apart.
Our Zen story from this week, about the fertility miracle is really good this way. The Zen master does not behave at all like you expect he should behave.
He’s supposed to make this miracle. He doesn’t argue or get caught up in it, he creates a trick.
Taking the mind to zero doesn’t have to be a big, huge, dramatic deal. Just accept the fact that all the things that are in our brain right now are not reliable. And it’s not you. That’s not you. It’s just something that’s been placed there by the stories we’ve been told since birth.
They are Just Stories
Like you can read a book, Harry Potter. You read Harry Potter, right? That’s just a story. You’re not Harry Potter.
There are truths in it, but it’s not real. Harry Potter has wonderful wisdom about learning how to live. How to deal with life. But you’re not the book. You can take the book, you can put it down. That’s not you. It’s just something that went into your brain. Before you read the book it wasn’t there in your mind. After you read the book it is there. Now you have this particular story in your head. It’s not you. It is a tool that’s been put in there. It’s a story.
So this is what we’re trying to do with non duality. Erase the insanity by coming to the truth of who we are.
In a very simple way we give it all up. We say it’s all insanity. It’s all nuts.
Who are you? Where is the you that’s not nuts? That’s what we are looking for. It’s the part of you that doesn’t need words. It’s the part of you that decides which one of these stories you want to listen to. You are the master. The stories are not the master.
You’ve got to know who you are in order to step out of the madness and start becoming an agent. Unless you step completely out of it, you’re going to always be spinning stories from your insanity.
Maybe we could say nonduality is simply a way to become solid.
Your best opportunity to do this is when your mind is racing. You stop and you say “I am not my mind.”
This is a healthy division. Now you’ve divided your experience into you and your mind. Now that it’s seen as two, you can see that you are not it.
It’s like, anytime you have that yaky yaky crazy thing going on in your head. Just say no. Stop. You’re not that thought. You’re not that decision. You don’t have to understand it. Words will not help.
Just quiet it down. Quiet it down. You’re not that. You’re not that. You’re not that.
Who are you? Find that out.