We’re spending a week challenging the history that we’ve been taught and exploring how that informs our worldview, how it informs our sense of who we are, and how it can spur our experience of nonduality.
Think way, way back in history. People have been here on Earth for a very long time but the written word has only been around a short time. What we call civilization has only been around for an even shorter time, and the modern world is just a flash.
Part of the history we are taught in school is about the geniuses that have made our civilized world. Just think of all the people we know: Archimedes, Michelangelo, Socrates, Jesus. We’re taught that these people come up with a brilliant idea and then it improves society, and then there’s another brilliant idea and it improves society. Every genius makes us better and we get more and more modern. Basically… brilliant people come along now and again and figure things out.
Of course we notice how it’s always guys. Right? And of course it’s only the people that get famous for some reason that end up being put on this genius list, right?
But there’s tons of geniuses all the time everywhere. Every school has people with super high IQs. Right? Those people are everywhere. They’re not necessarily successful, and we don’t necessarily hear about them, but every school is full of geniuses. They all grow up and they go and live their lives, and they’re out there doing something, right? We don’t necessarily hear about every single one of them. I think there is probably a certain percentage of people in every group who are full fledged geniuses, people who have brains that fire on a higher level than most
But the history we are told only highlights our famous brainiacs—Einstein, right? We’ve turned his name into the word for genius.
Now think way, way back into our deep, deep history. Our DNA is literally the same as the DNA of a person born 80,000 years ago. It’s only slightly different from somebody born 200,000 years ago, 300,000 years ago. Human beings have been around for a really long time.
The archaeological story we’re being told right now—which might be proven false in the future—is that about 60,000 years ago a group of hominids evolved our already-big brains into our present glory. They became very successful and started traveling. We traveled all over the planet.
Those were our ancestors inAfrica. Apparently it was a really big drought, and it was hard to survive. This small group of pre-humans, almost humans, had a breakthrough. A change in the brain. What some scientists are saying is that there was an increase in short-term memory so that a person could now start putting together longer sentences and understand how one thing over here is related to that thing over there.
One person had this change in her brain, and then all of her children had the same change. She was able to communicate with them better, we were able to think and reason better, and we were able to plan better. We got super good at adapting and surviving. This small, small band of pre-humans that almost were extinct—they are thinking there were like 20 people—grew into us, right? From that moment on the full DNA is in place.
From that moment on brilliance has been only a matter of degrees. But there can be big differences in those degrees.
Think of all the tribes of the people? Some people stayed in Africa. Some people came north, they went around the coast and down into Australia. They went up into China and across and over into Europe. Some came across the bearing straighten into the United States—every group of people had this amazing range of brilliance.
People always have variety within us. In every generation, in every tribe, there would have been some people with a lower IQ and some people with a higher IQ. Some people who run slower, some who run faster. Some with a bigger imagination. Some able to see further. All these centuries, all this time. It’s just obvious if you think about it for the second. It’s the way things happen. There’s been thousands of Einsteins, all over the place, living their lives and being brilliant, from day one.
Think back, and broadly. Imagine a tribe completely living out in nature. Geniuses were everywhere all the time.
The story we’ve been told is that they were so miserable, and they were so uncomfortable, and they were just wishing they could evolve into civilization. But no, they were completely, totally integrated into their world and living in their world in a cooperative group. All that genius was used to live in harmony.
Imagine: who was the first woman who came up with the idea of how to manage fire? It probably wasn’t just one person. It was probably a whole cooperative of geniuses exploring together. Fascinated with fire. Learning how to use it. Figuring out how to make that spark and create a campfire.
The breakthroughs were amazing. ‘Oh, you can do this with fire,’ and ‘Oh, you can do that with fire.’ Cooperating and figuring out how to use it. Who was the first woman who invented the wheel? Come on, we know it was a gal, right?
Throughout this whole time, we have been geniuses.
In a native society everyone was brilliant because life was complex and everyone contributed in some way. Imagine from the very first day that a person is born, they are being taught all the skills that it takes to survive in this cooperative group. Some places are easy to survive, right? Bananas growing on trees. And some places are difficult to survive, like we still have the Sami up in northern Europe who are still a native society. They’re the reindeer herders. It’s difficult to survive there but they figured it out. The eskimos up in Alaska were surviving just fine until the white men came and saved them, right?
We have been brilliant the whole time.
So let’s get over this idea that of the dark Savage living in dark darkness and let’s start instead giving ourselves and our ancestors the credit they deserve. They were probably smarter than us. They had better educations because they had to use their full brains from childhood up to adult. They could live right out there in the “wilderness” with no appliances.
Think of these 100,000 years of brilliant ancestors, men and women, children, everyone fully using their capacity as interconnected human beings… not just with each other, but in understanding the world. Listening to mother earth.
Imagine how much intelligence it takes to fully see the entire world as alive, to see water as alive, the soil as alive. Imagine being able to hear the plants that are coming into bloom and ready to eat. Imagine knowing where to go for the next season and how to best live there. Imagine hearing spirit as an everyday friend. This is a different way to see humanity.
So who are you? Now we can start to see… ‘Oh, wait. This is who I am. I am a human being.
We are living in a really weird society but we have all the tools and all the brilliant genius that is needed to cooperate and bring ourselves back out of the cult of the individual.
Cult of the individual. This is the thing we are dropping with our enlightenment seeking. We are seeking the inner harmony of the true human being. The inner realness.
It’s time to bring ourselves back.
It takes a lot of genius for a person to see that they interconnected this deeply. But it’s not the IQ of the left educated brain. It’s a fully functioning consciousness.
We have all these tools now. Realize that the language that runs through your head is not your being, it is just language. There’s something way bigger and deeper that we can see with and know without language.
I am the one that’s seeing this. I am the one being this. I am alive.
This is who I am, this is who you are. You are the person living your life. There’s not two things going on inside your head, there’s one thing. There’s one thing interconnected with everything. You’re completely interconnected with your thoughts, you’re completely interconnected with your language. You’re interconnected with me, and language is connecting us.
We can use this other picture of history to speak to us of humanity. This broader picture of human genius is a way more useful story of who we are.
Hopefully you can feel how this expands your consciousness itself. How this opens your ability to appreciate who you are today. Hopefully it opens the vision of what we need to do to move within this cooperative field of being a human. We are surrounded by the air on the Earth, completely intertwined with everything.
The more we see ourselves this way the easier it is to finally drop the shell and admit that you are just you. That’s the gift of Nonduality and the gift of native teachings. Moving with this we can live cooperating with each other and the Earth and in gratitude for this magnificent opportunity. This magnificent gift.