Let’s talk a little bit about my discovery. How did I put Nonduality and Native wisdom together in this way? What made me come up with this crazy idea? This little story will help as our discussion goes forward.
I have a long history in Nonduality. I’m doing this video in 2023 but I’ve been a serious student of amazing and effective teachers since the ’80s. I took Sannyas with Osho in 1988, was certified as a teacher by Swami Yogino in 1990. I’m a Dances of Universal Peace leader, a Kirtan leader, a student of Andrew Cohen… I’ve learned from everyone. I’m even a certified Teacher of Presence through Eckhart Tolle. That is my training.
For decades, I related to spirituality through that paradigm. Just like with all the other Nonduality teachers there’s a certain point in time when you see who you are. At that point the Nondual reality makes total sense beyond thoughts. It’s an obvious reality… but now, how do you describe it?
It’s the dilemma that has plagued Nondualy and enlightenment teachings from day one.
One thing we know about enlightenment is that it can’t be described in words. But we try. One of the best ways a teacher can learn to describe the Nondual reality is to read what other teachers have said. I’ve done that a lot. I’ve gone through phases where I’m trying to describe it one way. Then I try to describe it another way. Often I give up and just sing and dance. And then I go back to trying to describe it another way. Around and around. Nothing seems to work for people.
All this time I’ve had this inkling, suspicion (actually, not a suspicion it’s just obvious) that Enlightenment teachings, and non-duality teachings simply can’t work for most people. It is amazing how off-track people can get from studying these things.
I’m always curious: why is that? Why is that? There needs to be an easier way to describe these things.
Everything is a mess. For instance; people have invented paths. There are so many paths. Here in the Western world we like to take up the path that seems the easiest, and the most fun.
The most popular is the path of love. But we can easily examine what the path of love does for people and see that it gets us nowhere fast. It’s sad because the path of love makes people pretend to be loving as they become less and less loving. The desire to be non-judgmental seems to make people more and more judgmental.
For decades I’ve been scratching my head over it. Why? Why is it that way? What else can be done?
Then one day, I ran across the book that changed my perspective. It was ‘Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.’
The book is about Robin’s journey with plants. She’s part Native American, she’s also a scientist, and she’s studying and teaching plants. She’s listening to plants and the book is her journey through the exploration. She’s an amazing poet. As I read this book I’m realizing that she is perfectly describing the non-dual state. And not only that, she is describing how you get from western thinking into this non-dual state.
I’m fascinated and my journey into the algorithm of native wisdom writers begins. Now, everywhere I turn, I find more and more native and indigenous philosophers, teachers who are describing this exact same thing.
This is huge. All these wisdom teachings are talking about the same thing nonduality is talking about: living in the nondual state. But it’s not lost in a mire of concepts about how to get there. It’s a poetic journey of what it looks like from there. Native wisdom is talking about how to be there, how to live there, with everyone else… always with everyone else.
Nonduality, is about, ‘How do I, as an individual, get to Enlightenment?’ Native wisdom is about, ‘How do I listen to the unity that is always around me?’
This is why Nonduality always misses the point. And of course it makes sense because everything’s interconnected whether you see it or not, right? You do not get to Enlightenment as an individual, with individuality intact. Native wisdom is saying it takes the interconnectedness of everything, not just humans but plants and air and sun and the earth and all these things to be there.
The more I looked into this the more I started seeing the intersection. I began to realize that this is why non-dual teachings turn so complicated. It’s because Nonduality teachings are trying to take this intersection of everything, this relatedness of everything, and turn it into concepts that fit into our language and fit into the way that we think. It has to go the other way around, we have to drop the ‘way’ we think in order to start seeing the unity that is already there.
For us western English speakers it’s even worse. We are translating Nonduality teachings from eastern thought-languages (like Sanskrit) into our English thought-language and our culture.
There is a good documentary that shows this: Rays of the Absolute (the Legacy of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj). In fact, it reveals the disconnect of cultures without knowing it!
This is a documentary that interviews Nisargadatta’s translators years after the guru’s death. The fascinating thing is that the film is done by a western man who had been with Nisargadatta for years, receiving the teachings through these same translators.
In the film you can see that all the translators really got what Nisargadatta was teaching… but the western documentary maker was still confused. So even in the presence of the great teacher the translation from language to language didn’t work. The original translators spoke the same language as Nisargadatta, so they were understanding what he was talking about on a deeper level than the people that they were translating for could ever get. It wasn’t just the words, the translators were also part of the full culture, and the people, of India. It seeped into their very pores.
The language we speak, the culture we live in, the people we are surrounded by, has a lot more to do with the full story of human enlightenment than we can know. Perhaps we can lift ourselves out of our limited conditionings by expanding our thinking into the deep, deep history of humanity. This is a deep history that we all share. It’s the story of deep human unity.
This is what I’m exploring in this series on Nonduality and Native spirituality. Hopefully I can get to a place that is truly transforming for you.