It’s hard to talk about something that’s truly new. As we explored in our last video it’s because we are limited by language itself. If it’s truly new our language has no words for it.
In my next series of videos, I’m going to be exploring how Nonduality and Native wisdom fit together. This hasn’t really been done.
There are lots of people who have fabulous things to say about nonduality, and there are amazing Native philosophers, wisdom carriers, who are coming to us and bringing the reality of the Native worldview into mainstream thought.
Why is it so hard to see how these two things connect? Why is it so hard to talk about it?
It’s because there is no precedent. We can take it from law shows, right? Nobody else has really talked about this as far as I know. I’ve never seen anybody else make this connection, so I have to invent it as I go. I don’t have anyone to quote, and have no authority. But more than that, the words haven’t been invented for it yet.
I think it’s Andrew Cohen who talks about a groove in consciousness. This means that until there’s a bunch of different brains working on a problem together, that it’s really, really hard to express it. He’s a good case study because Andrew Cohen is the one who started talking about the evolution of consciousness itself. He had to work decades to learn how to talk about it and to get people to start seeing how it works.
Now everywhere you go, everybody’s talking about the evolution of consciousness and how consciousness itself is evolving and things like that. A groove was created and grew by itself.
We need grooves in consciousness to really understand things. It takes more than one brain to sort out something new because it’s the interconnection between us that matters.
As a matter of fact, I can create a groove in my own consciousness simply by talking about something new in YouTube videos. As I talk through each video the language to express this inner knowing is created. We see it as “practice makes perfect.” The more I talk the better I get at talking.
I have this idea in my head. Then I try to take it out of that place where consciousness and the subconscious meet, where I truly understand what it is I’m trying to say. The skill, then, is how to take that and put it into the language that we share, which is English.
It’s hard. It’s hard to think of how to say it. The idea itself is so vast, and so interconnected. But to talk I need to bring it down into very very limited language. Put it into sentences. Start with a single point and bring other ideas into it.
As I continue along the journey of putting these ideas together I’m going to be saying it in as many wrong ways as I can possibly come up with. I’ll learn from mistake after mistake, and slowly grooves will form.
Hopefully, what will happen is that those of you out there watching my videos will let me know what doesn’t make any sense. I know you guys will do that for sure, anyway. I’m sure that comments will arrive in a really mean, snarky way– because nobody is forgiving on YouTube, right?
But some of you will give me good ideas about how I’ve said it. It’ll give me clues, ‘Oh, yes. I see how that was misunderstood. Or I see how that made sense to people.’ and it will start helping me work out how to put these two ideas together. We’ll create a small groove in consciousness.
But meanwhile, at the very beginning of this it’s hard to figure out how to talk about it. That’s one of the ways we know that something’s truly new, because there aren’t little sayings that go along with it. There are no memes.
So let’s work on this together: bringing in something like a new vision, a new way of seeing the human being itself, a new way to be a human being. Hopefully this will be helpful for native people and non-native people alike, for people who are deeply studied in nonduality and for those who are new to it.
It will be interesting to see where we go. Meanwhile, do know that it’s tough to talk about something that’s truly a new idea. That’s one of the reasons why we as human beings get stuck in the same thing over and over and over. It’s easier to repeat. It’s the default mode. Usually we simply say the same thing over and over, maybe with a few different words, but end up, going around and around in the same place, stuck in the same paradigm.
The question here is — how can we really bust out of that vicious loop in an integral way that’s going to be useful to everybody? It’s what I’m looking for. Good luck to you. Good luck to me.