We’re retelling the story of humanity here in this series of videos, sitting around the fire and telling stories. One of the things that I love to do is to watch TV and movies because this is our main storytelling medium today. I’ve noticed over the years that it seems to go through themes, and the themes reflect what’s going on in society.
Like when I was young, there was a time where it was all cowboy and Indian movies. It was interesting because, of course, you know, the cowboys—the white people—coming in and to the land, and there would almost always be a Native American person who was particularly wise. It affected me as a young person because it was showing, look, there is something else available as a human being that was there before civilization. I caught it from these small little snippets in these movies. So they were telling the story of conquest, but this subtly came in where they were sparking in little truths that the people who wrote and created it probably didn’t even know. But isn’t that true, though, that we have a sense that there’s something more about humanity than we think about and that we’ve been told? That’s why we’re retelling the story of humanity here in these series.
Then through my life, all of a sudden, it was during the Cold War, and all the movies were about spies. You know, when we were the good guys and we were going and spying on the bad guys. Then, it went through all these phases. I remember—gosh, I don’t remember the name of the movie—but, oh, we know the line, “You can’t handle the truth,” right? Those sorts of movies started coming in where the hero was noticing that his mentors were the evil people. It was very significant. It was like all of a sudden, “Oh my god, I’ve been told a lie. My boss is the bad guy.” I mean, that came through a whole bunch of different themes of movies.
These days, the theme that I’m seeing in movies is, well, first of all, there are so many post-apocalyptic movies. Thirty years ago, that wasn’t even a genre. Now, it is. You type in post-apocalyptic movie, and you get thousands and thousands of them to watch. But even in the post-apocalyptic movies, the theme is that everything is our parents’ fault. Every single hero has a huge chip on their shoulder about either their mother or their father—usually their father. The basic theme is that every terrible thing that’s going on in this person’s life is because of their parents, because they got neglected. Some of them got horribly abused. Of course, that’s true—that damages you—but it’s like this theme that everything is our parents’ fault.
We even have this generationally, don’t we? That we are in this mess we’re in today because of our immediate ancestors. It’s true; we don’t have the very best track record of being human beings over the past several hundred years, probably several thousand years, right? But why I’m retelling the story of humanity is to take us way back further than that. It doesn’t have to be in a straight timeline. Throughout this 2,000- to 4,000-year history where we’ve been creating written history, there have always been little pockets of natural people living on the planet. I mean, that’s the story of civilization anyway, isn’t it? The story we’ve been told is how the explorers go and find some beautiful, untouched land but neglect to mention the fact that there are already people living there. They are not the first people to discover where people are living. There are people, you know.
There’s so much that our immediate ancestors did to wipe out the idea of these people, so we don’t stop and look at the story from the other side and go, “Wait a minute, that means they were actually there.” If we had to go through all this government response to destroy the people that were on the uncharted lands, it’s because they were there. They were actually there. We can go back through our history, and every single one of us can trace ourselves back to before civilization got us. Maybe that’s a good way to look at it—that civilization got us, and now we’re stuck inside of it.
Jason Yangapura, who wrote “Sand Talk,” has a good way to describe it. He says when people became civilized, they became domesticated. They became tamed. Tamed and domesticated. So domesticated is a good way to look at it. But we can take ourselves back, back, back, back to the place where we were all living as natural human beings. If you just put it into the simplest timeline, using the very easiest math that you can possibly use, you see that the vast, vast history of humanity was living in this natural state. It’s only been this little, teeny-tiny sliver at the end that we happen to be in that’s been living in this destructive state: tamed, domesticated, hierarchy. You can’t be domesticated unless somebody domesticated you, unless somebody’s owning you. Maybe that’s a good way to talk about it. Through most of human history, we were not owned by anybody, and now we are.
So, when we start looking at this long, long history of humanity and putting ourselves in it, we can start rebuilding a different story of who we actually are. We are not this tamed, domesticated, owned person. That is not our natural state. Our natural state is freedom. Even Buddha and all the enlightened masters use the word “freedom” and the word “enlightenment” together. It’s freedom from the thought processes that have been imposed on us that have made us get lost in the mind.
I love watching TV because it shows us where we are on this timeline. Now, something interesting is starting to come into human consciousness, and you can see it reflected in TV shows. It’s only been two to four years, a slight amount of time, that all of a sudden, women are the heroes of stories. They’re the heroes of TV shows; they’re the detectives, the FBI agents. We have movies now with totally unrealistic fight scenes, but let’s face it, the fight scenes have always been unrealistic. This little, tiny gal, 5’5″, can wipe out 20 big, huge guys by jumping around, going upside down, running up walls, and kicking them. It’s fun to watch. But all of a sudden, this is new. A decade ago, the only role that women had was to get the boyfriend or to get married or who they were going to fall in love with. But the actual hero of the story was always a guy. Look how that’s just totally changed.
There is another little genre coming in, and I’m going to go down in the description of this video and put in some good movies that I’ve seen lately. It’s movies that have indigenous people either as the actual stars of the show or as a side character that’s bringing in some interesting wisdom and being listened to. The theme of these movies is that there is this natural human wisdom that is still available to us on the planet. It’s something new. It’s coming into the human consciousness, bubbling up collectively.
Here’s my gig, because this is a YouTube channel about nonduality, right? I’m teaching nonduality, which is a buzzword for enlightenment. That’s what we’re talking about: how to wake up, how to get out of this false mind that we’ve been given. What I want to see is lots of people waking up and starting to rewrite the story of who we are. The reason is because once you wake up, your thought systems become very fluid. You’re able to start seeing things from a different perspective and not just getting stuck in our conditioning. It’s like going into a state of constant curiosity. Maybe that’s the clue right there. Whether you’ve had some big awakening experience or not, you can live in a state of constant curiosity. What if it was the other way around? What if that was changed? Where did I get this idea? Constantly scrubbing ourselves clean of our concepts.
Full circle, that’s right back to what nonduality is. It’s saying it’s not two, which is literally talking about your mind. It’s not talking about the number of trees in the forest or the number of people or even the number of ideas. It’s talking about you feeling separate from things that are outside of you because you use your mind to define those things. Nonduality is literally talking about scrubbing ourselves clean of misconception.
The more we do that, the more we’re going to find ourselves living in this state of the authentic, real human being. Real human beings are able to come together and learn how to live well within our ecosystem and within our societies. So, let’s start rewriting that story. What would that look like?