Flat Earth and nonduality—you might be thinking, what do those have to do with each other?
Well… lately, I have been talking about nonduality and Native wisdom. I’ve been saying that nonduality didn’t start with Buddha. It didn’t start with Nisargadatta. It didn’t start with Rupert Spira or Adyashanti, or anybody. These people are all describing a state that was already there. Just like Newton didn’t ‘discover’ gravity—he didn’t create gravity; he just found a way to describe it.
The nondual state has always been there. All of these people—Buddha in particular—who have described the state have been misinterpreted. So many stories have grown up around it that the idea of nonduality has turned into a total fiction.
Anything you hear about Nonduality is crazy. What we’ve actually interpreted the nondual state to be is nuts.
As I try to talk to people about it I see their misunderstandings. The belief that it’s a philosophy, a system of thought, rather than a natural state is deeply intrenched. It’s very hard to break through the conceptions to show just how real and ancient the nondual state is.
I’ve realized lately that it’s just like talking to a Christian fundamentalist about evolution. I’m calling it Flat Earth, but it’s the same thing, right? People who believe the world is flat because the Bible doesn’t say it’s round, or people who believe the world was created 6,000 years ago, and refuse to listen to anything different.
This is the same fundamental belief that people studying Eastern mysticism have, almost as if enlightenment was invented when Buddha lived 2,600 years ago. No! Buddha simply discovered a natural state that’s always been there.
We need to get past this “Flat Earth Society” mindset that everyone is stuck in and start looking at reality as if it’s real.
Big concept, right? [Laughter]
We need to realize that the nondual state is the natural human state. There are plenty of people around the world still living in indigenous communities who exist in this natural state. The second we truly realize the truth in that all seeking changes completely. You’re not seeking something in the future, something outside yourself—you’re seeking yourself. And how can you seek yourself? You’re right there!
You’re trying to become fully aware of your humanity, which is always there. The stories implanted in our heads cause us to miss this truth. Once you realize this, everything makes sense.
This is why spiritual teachers instruct students to calm down, relax, sit still, and be silent. When you calm down, relax, sit still, and just be silent, you are your natural self. Even when you’re running around, angry, and your mind’s going crazy, you’re still your natural self—it’s just that you don’t like that version of you.
Coming down into your actual being, you see that you’re only this simple, alive presence. You have a name, that’s you; you have a being, that’s you. When you’re solid in knowing who you are, in a way that you can’t be convinced otherwise, then you can live your life from that state of being. You become a positive contributor to the world rather than the consumer we’ve been trained to be. It becomes much harder to fool you. You begin interacting with people in new ways and bringing new modes of being into the society we live in.
The indigenous truths we still have today are the old way of being human, but we need to modernize it so that it works within today’s society. We don’t have to throw everything away, but we do need to clean up a lot of garbage—just look at the mess we’ve created! That’s a big job, but we’re humans, and we like doing things, figuring things out.
In order to take on this job we have to shed our consumer mentality and the conviction that we don’t know who we are.
The moment you know who you are, you become responsible for everything. And from that place of responsibility, we can act like fully adult human beings, capable of living sustainably with all our relations—with each other, the atmosphere, the water, the four-legged beings, and all the living creatures in the ocean.
Then we can see our connection and start acting as if we’re not on a flat Earth that was created 6,000 years ago. We are on an ancient, beautiful, living Earth, and we are the living Earth, awake, with responsibilities as human beings. This is the new way we’ll start living, rooted in the old understandings of reality.