Are you afraid of making a mistake in your life, in your work, just making a mistake, period? Of course, you are, we all are.
But here’s a thing to think about: What if this isn’t the natural human state?
This is the perfect example of how we can use Nonduality to awaken ourselves. It’s about examining and questioning all our concepts. Examining fear, from an awakened perspective, can be very useful!
Many spiritual teachings will be a meditation about the result of fear, “You aren’t a mistake,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. As if you can dissolve it, or fix it, using the thing that created it in the first place.
Nonduality is better than that. It’s like, “I’m going to simply talk you out of it. I’m going to show you that that is a false thing. It doesn’t exist.” Once you see it as false, it can go away.
Now, it’s not that you will never make a mistake again, and it’s not that you’ll still not have that fear about making a mistake, but that fear won’t grip you. It will just be like a river flowing through your consciousness all the time.
So let’s get rid of it once and for all!
This fear of making a mistake is not a natural human reaction to life. This is something that has been taught to us in our particular culture. It’s been taught to us very effectively. The number one thing that has taught us this is school. School is all about showing you all the mistakes that you make. Like tests, right?
It’s pounded into us in school. “Who knows the answer?” The good kids raise their hands, “I know, I know.”
Everything about school is to teach you that you’re wrong and that you need to be afraid of making mistakes. If you don’t make mistakes, you get an A, and then you’re a good student. You get to go to college. You get to make lots of money. If you make mistakes you get an F, a D minus.
We can get rid of this by seeing it clearly. Start by seeing how this has been pounded into us, this idea that making mistakes is bad.
Even before we went to school we got in trouble for making mistakes… like when we were naughty little children, which I hope we all were, right? I was! Every time we’re naughty little children, we get punished.
I mean, holy cow! We have whole holidays based on this! We have this guy who wears a red suit. He comes every year and gives presents to the good little children but not to the naughty children, right?
Don’t make a mistake!
Everything about our society pounds this in. Like, Valentine’s Day. That gets us on both sides. If you’re not perfect enough and you don’t have a relationship, here’s the whole day where you can sit around and feel sad about that. Or if you do have a relationship, you better not make a mistake on that day or you’ll be in really bad trouble. Right?
Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes.
So now we can see that this has been totally pounded into us. What we need to see next is that it is not a natural human thing to be worried about mistakes. If we can throw away the history we’ve been taught about it then we can be free.
Many people will think, “Well, back in the days when we were cavemen, it was incredibly important to never make any mistakes because if you make a mistake, a lion will eat you.”
It’d be easy for some professor to write a whole book to tell us how this fear of making mistakes is natural, if we only think of our own perspective and of lions. But examined from a point of awakening that just can’t be true. First, our history story doesn’t understand that everything is unity. Second, it doesn’t realize that human beings could not have lived that way because of our very nature. And third: they’ve never listened to any Native or Aboriginal or wisdom keepers who can still tell us what it’s like to live in a natural society.
Our story is that, “You have to be afraid of making mistakes, or else a lion’s going to eat you if you make a mistake. If you make a mistake, you’re not going to be able to find food. What if you’re out hunting, and you make a mistake, and you miss the deer, then you don’t get food, and then… disaster!,
Fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear! We believe it so deeply. We take this story that we want to believe, and turn it into our deep history.
But if you know about human nature, and about nature itself, it could not have been true because human beings did not evolve to live by themselves.
So now. Let’s relax ourselves out of that whole mistake thing. Let’s start to picture what being a natural person living in a natural state would have been like.
You would not have been by yourself. There would be lots of people around, always helping you. Any mistake that you make would be a very, very small deal. You wouldn’t be criticized for it. From what I can see natural people had really great senses of humor. Silly little mistakes would simply be laughed at. Like, “Oh my gosh, you broke that arrowhead when you were making it.” Not cruel laughter but fun jabbing laughter.
I started understanding this picture of the natural human by reading “Sand Talk,” which was written by an Aboriginal man, Tyson Yunkaporta. He was talking about archaeologists. How they find bones and examine the bones for clues about what humans used to be. He said, “You’ve got to understand that every bone that archaeologists are finding are from someone who somehow had been separated from the tribe. Because if they had been part of the tribe, they would have been taken care of both in life and in death. Their bones wouldn’t have been findable, because they would have been buried properly.”
Now, take that idea of human unity in the tribe. Put yourself in this situation where you are so surrounded with the wisdom of your tribe that a mistake literally wouldn’t matter.
Why would you be afraid of making a mistake if it doesn’t matter?
See how we don’t have to process the fear? We just have to see it as false. Think of all the little things that happen all day long and what it would be like to live without that fear because you are held in unity. Everything becomes small.
You’re walking down the street, turn left. Oh, gosh, I should have gone the other way. You just turn around; you go the other way. Nothing is ever more critical than that. It’s simple, simple, simple.
In our past aboriginal life there would never have been situations where a person would be criticized for making a mistake. This fear is totally unfounded. It’s been manufactured. Can you start feeling how that understanding releases you? Once you realize it’s not true it can melt away.
In the grand scope of the pure unity of all things it can’t possibly be true that our mistakes are important.
They’re unimportant. Can you feel the difference?
What does this have to do with nonduality?
Well… what we just did is we took a concept and examined it until it went away. This fear we have of making mistakes is something we hold on to firmly without e even knowing it. We dissolved it by looking at it with a new view of reality.
Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Not that the fear is gone, but the grip it has on us is gone. You’re not cured of it, you simply see it clearly now. You’re probably still afraid of making a mistake because that has been so ingrained into you. But now when it happens, it’s not going to suck your attention. You’re free.
What Nonduality practices are about is diving deep. Finding concept after concept after concept after concept, things that we have taken to be true, and dissolve them. Take all these ideas that have been telling us who we are and dissolve them in the truth of nothingness.
There are an unlimited number of false concepts. We could spend our lives going through concept after concept after concept and showing how it has all been manufactured.
A cool way to think about it is that it has not been manufactured by you or by me; it’s been manufactured by the culture we live in for of thousands of years. It took centuries for this to build up to be a thing that can grip us so completely.
That’s why I emphasize going into our deep past. Human beings are a very interesting creature because we’re so social. We always think about the big brain, but the big brain couldn’t have happened without a cohesive tribe. We started being social and taking care of each other hundreds of thousands of years ago; otherwise babies with bigger brains could have never survived. Our babies need a number of people to take care of them. Lots of people to bring food. Lots of people to hold every baby. It takes a lot to raise a big brained baby! You and I wouldn’t be here without this total cohesion.
Human beings also evolved to start living longer. We live beyond our reproductive years. Evolutionarily; that doesn’t make any sense. But when you see the broad picture, you see it’s because wisdom is important for human beings.
This all comes back to making mistakes.
Now, with this new picture of being human, put yourself in a life where you are held by this group; you’re so a part of it you never think of being separate. You’re literally not separate from the human beings around you. Some of them are younger than you, some of them are older than you. The wisdom keepers, the older people, are holding you in their care so that your mistakes will not end up in you being eaten by a lion. You’re not going to be thrown out there; “Hey there boy! Go out in the jungle and see if you get eaten by a lion or not.” That’s not going to happen.
I mean, yeah, bad things happened to people, obviously. But not with this cultural, habitual fear that we have about making a mistake at all.
Now we have industries based on our fears. We have huge businesses, especially these days with the internet, all created about teaching you how to not make a mistake, how to do everything perfectly. There are unlimited categories. Like, if you run a business perfectly, you’ll make lots of money. You can buy a book on how to be a perfect woman so you attract a man. You can buy a book how to be a perfect man and never make any mistakes; you attract a woman, right?
It’s the basis of our capitalistic society. It’s one of the things destroying the earth. Huge industries based on relieving us of this fear about making mistakes.
First of all, the society creates it. Then we spend our lives trying to relieve ourselves of it, or cure it.
Nonduality says, “Just see it as false. That is just a false thing.”
So, this is one way we can use Nonduality to work through these false concepts. This is what they call the veil, the crust, that is over us. Let it go and reveal the actual human being that is you, living your life.