History is written by the conquerors. We all know this. How in the world does this apply to any kind of spirituality, or Nonduality, or native wisdom?
Well… it’s because you and I, and all the people on this planet, are the result of the history that’s happened. Everything that our ancestors have done has created our society. More important than that, our entire world view has been created by this society. Our very way of thinking and viewing reality has been built through these past few thousand years of nations conquering nations.
History is full of conquerers. For many of us studying non-duality… that’s us. We are these conquering people.
We’ll argue that we are innocent, and of course we are. We didn’t personally go out with a sword and kill people and conquer. We were just born here. Right? What’s important, when seen from a spiritual perspective though, is that we are the result of the culture that did this. We carry it unexamined within us.
All of the stories in my head, my very idea of who I am, comes from the conquering worldview. Everything that I have been taught since I was very, very young comes from this conquering culture.
This is what non-duality teachings are about: How do we step beyond this conditioned self that we’ve been given so that we can start to find out who we are and what is true? Because so much of what we’ve been told simply isn’t true.
For instance, the only way that a conquering culture can justify what they’ve done is to tell stories about how those they’ve conquered are lesser. “Something’s wrong with those people. We needed to conquer them.”
This is particularly true of this last wave of conquerors that came from England and Northern Europe. They (we) swept through the entire world and claimed all the land and all the countries. The story we had to be told was that something was wrong with these savages. We were coming in with civilization and the proper religion to fix them up.
Even our science of anthropology tells this story. We’ve been told that all these poor native people were living in starvation and ignorance. We have terrible labels for deep history. Stone age (they were hitting each other with stones). Bronze age (they improved and started hitting each other with bronze.) Iron age (bring on the sword!) The age of enlightenment (they finally became civilized enough to have armies.)
We are told that pre-civilized people lived terribly. They were basically sitting around and waiting to evolve so they could have civilization.
Even that word, “civilization.” We brought civilization to the savages. We are told that today we have this wonderful civilization that evolved out of a past of savage ignorance.
History books are full of our brilliant, civilized glory. Those history books are being rewritten now, and it’s important that you and I be a part of this new story. That we share this around. That we talk about this and tell this new story. A deeper look through anthropology, and native wisdom-stories reveals that native people around the world were living much better lives than civilization has brought.
It’s probably true that there are a few of us modern people who are rich enough to be really comfortable. Most of us really aren’t. We struggle all day long, don’t we?
Apparently, native people did not struggle all day long. So it’s important to talk about pre-history in this context, so we can start bringing in this new vision of what it means to be a human being.
A human being is not someone who owns the world. Our entire culture is based on ownership, and this is so deep in our minds. It causes an insane division between us and everything. In order to be able to conquer and divide, we had to decide that there was an ‘other,’ and there is an ‘us,’ and there is a ‘mine.’
You would never run out and conquer yourself, stab yourself in the heart. So, we had to deeply believe that things were separate. This applies to land as well as people. How can you own something that’s as alive and as aware as you?
This certainly applies to slaves, right? We had to really, really believe that the people that we were enslaving were somehow lesser and separate from us. We don’t believe this openly now, but the systems are embedded in our language and our culture. Separation is so deep in our consciousness, so embedded in the stories that build our consciousness that we can’t even see them. We need to dive in deep in order to rewrite them.
The first thing we need to do is change the picture we have of native people and of our own past ancestors.
What native people are telling us is that for hundreds of thousands of years, human beings were living really nice lives. They were comfortable, they were happy, they didn’t have to work really hard, there wasn’t constant war, they weren’t consumed with disease, they weren’t sitting around and starving.
One of the stories I’ve heard was of Captain Cook who goes down and “discovers” Australia. This is deeply buried in the history books because they don’t want us to hear this, but he’s marching across the landscape that he has now claimed for his country, and he said that there were miles and miles of sweet potatoes growing. Lush fields filled the landscape, further than you could see. Nobody was hungry.
Our deep ancestors knew how to live in their world. It’s possible for human beings to know how to live in harmony on the earth with each other.
This is the true, real human being.
The stories that have been told to us by our conquering cultures need to be erased from our brains. They are not true.
It is not true that people were miserable savages. It is not true that nobody lived over thirty. It’s not true that they were miserable and dirty.
It is true that we can learn from our deep ancestors, and from the native cultures still alive, how to be a natural human being.
In this series I’m talking about the intersection of nonduality and native wisdom. I want to make it clear that native wisdom does not need Nonduality. A native person who has been raised in a totally different paradigm does not need Nonduality. You and me, and this conquering world we live in, are the ones who need Nonduality and enlightenment teachings.
Nonduality was designed by a conquered culture and it is a simple tool to help us uncover our spark of self knowing. Nonduality simply means to look at your thoughts and know they are not you. There are not two different things inside you. The term Nonduality means “Not two.” If you take on this simple practice you eventually get to the bottom where there is no division. When concepts are ignored it appears to be nothing, and yet perception itself is there. I like to say that you discover who is driving the boat.
This is what enlightenment is all about. It’s the tool of the conquered mind to un-conquer ourselves. You know the story of Buddha, yes? He was a rich prince. He thought that’s how everybody was living. And then he happens to go out and he sees the horrible poverty of everyone else. He freaks out. He’s like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, something’s wrong.’
In that moment he realized that he had been lied to his whole life. He had to run off and do some insanely dramatic things to drop through it. Many self awareness tools and traditions have come from what he discovered. But in the end the whole mysticism of the east is also mired in the conquering worldview. Buddha’s final conclusion was that everyone was in misery and they needed to completely drop the mind to get out of misery.
How’s about a world where people aren’t miserable in the first place? The new story of humanity is telling us just that. Today we are all miserable, yes? We need a tool to step out of it. Nonduality is a good tool to work through the divided mind, but the vision of the end result needs retold. Nonduality needs native wisdom in order to bring us into a more realistic story of where we’re getting to. This new vision will stop enlightenment teachings from turning into confused thinking and making everyone even more miserable.
Buddha didn’t have the resources that we have right now. He didn’t know that humans had been living in harmony on the earth for a hundred thousand years. All he saw was the misery of his own culture. All he discovered was how to move beyond his conditioned mind to get to zero inside himself.
Buddha taught other people how to find this breakthrough within his broken culture. But they had no idea that there were hundreds of thousands of years where people were able to live in this state without needing to search for enlightenment. He had no idea that the world, at the time, was full of free people living that reality.
Once we add native wisdom into the search for enlightenment, we totally change what it is we’re doing. I’m hoping to dramatically increase our ability to get to this place so that we can start living with each other as truly awake human beings. We can start living with a deep history of aliveness and interconnectedness. This is the history that we deserve to know about. The history of how we are so intricately connected to everything that is around us.
Nonduality tip: The only thing that has any separation at all is our conditionings. All of reality is real. Only our imaginations and conclusions about it are false.
The lie we’ve been told, that we are separate, has created a psychotic break inside humans. It’s destroyed our ability to see from a point of unity. Get rid of the break. It’s the break that is an illusion. There is no separation at all. We can start seeing that this very moment. By using enlightenment teachings and native wisdom together we can come at it from both sides.
Tip: Don’t pretend you are from a native tribe. Don’t steal native ceremonies and call yourself a shaman. Your pretense comes from a state of division and makes all of us even crazier. You can’t pretend yourself into reality.
We can change this paradigm entirely.
Native wisdom comes at it from below. It’s like, “Look at the Earth. Look at the sky. Simply look around and see. Ask all your living relations: the human and the non-human.”
Nonduality comes to it from the top down by examining your experiencer. If you constantly ask yourself “Who am I?” you’ll quickly see that your experiencer is divided. You can step away from the division and meet the place of beingness that is unity in one breath.
The big danger is for divided people to start pretending that they understand unity. We are very good pretenders and the second we do that we are lost. Nonduality teachings it’s better to know you are divided than to pretend you are in unity. That’s why we say Not Two instead of One.
When we have this full picture, we can start moving forward. There are, and will be, numerous enlightened people, rather than one little enlightened guy over here and one little enlightened guy there… with the rest of us bowing down to the guru.
Nope. All of us. I’m talking all of us.