So let’s talk about history. They say that history is written by the conquerors… but have we looked deeply into what that means?
First it helps to stretch the human story into a longer timeline. When we look at the full length of history there is something like 100,000 years of human beings on the planet. Pre-humans goe back millions of years. It is only in this last little sliver of that time we have had conquering nations. It’s only in the last few thousand years that groups of people have risen up and taken over other communities in massive ways.
Think about the history we learn in school, right? We learn about Egyptians, and Romans, and England conquering other people. Armies have marched everywhere, leaving destruction in their wake. Once we learned how to trick people into joining armies and marching off to conquer other people-then the stories were only written by those people.
All these stories about conquering require a certain division of brain. You would never march out and conquer another person that you are in deep relation with. In order to be able to conquer other people, we had to be convinced of the other. We had to be convinced of “the other” in our relation to the earth as well. We had to see that land itself was the other, something to be possessed. This has so much to do with language because our language, then, built up around this conquering culture.
We now consider this divided state to be human nature… when apparently it’s not.
Today there are a lot of indigenous people, native people, stepping forward and bringing us knowledge-stories of a different worldview. We need to listen. The rest of us are the result of this history of conquering cultures. We may think our history is bad and not want to be part of it, but even that sentiment is divisive. It assumes the other… all those bad people in the past who happen to be our ancestors. Everything about us is this division because our very worldview comes from there. This is important to understand about Nonduality because Nonduality is about stepping out of the attachment to our worldview, but it still only has the habitual language of a conquered society and that worldview to communicate with.
What this means is that the interpretations of enlightenment teachings come from a divided, conquering worldview. Once we see this it’s obvious in the teachings. Enlightenment teachings focus on relieving suffering… the very suffering that comes from a divided consciousness. It’s also often called awakening because stepping into this enlightened state feels much like waking up. And it is waking up… waking from that very addition to thoughts which is generated by our worldview.
If you look back at the story of Buddha it clearly shows the conquering worldview. Buddha lived in a very divided society but most of his life he didn’t see it. It blew his mind when he saw it for the first time.
Buddha was living as a pampered prince. Then he sneaks out and sees how other people are living and he’s like, ‘Wait, wait a minute. How can this be?’ He realized that the place he inhabited in his brain didn’t match up with reality. It took stringent practices for him to jump out of it.
Keep two thing in mind though. Once he had broken through his layers of mind and perceptions he could only speak about it using the language structures of his time. All he knew was life where he lived… and he lived in a divided society. So his teachings were about that division, about the relief that’s experienced when you step out of it… and he was teaching in his native tongue/culture to other people who shared that same tongue/culture.
This is ultimately the tradition that Nonduality comes from. Also, Nonduality is more Hindu than Buddhist. Hindu societies are some of the most divided, hierarchical societies that we’ve ever invented. Nonduality starts with the assumption that you’re divided. The divided state is assumed to be the natural state. The hierarchy of Hinduism is based on the assumption that spiritual people are higher, and that higher (more privileged) people are more spiritual.
Step back from this worldview and of course we can see it. All of us who are in these conquering cultures are divided. We start out divided. That’s why Enlightenment teachings, and Nonduality teachings, are a query into how to step out of that division back into a place of oneness.
What these traditions have forgotten is that oneness and unity was the natural human experience for hundreds of thousands of years before civilization took root. Division is not the natural state. It’s is simply our habitual state.
The divided state is so pervasive that we assume it’s the only state possible. From this point of view enlightenment itself seems exotic and unusual. The teachings reflect this worldview and aren’t effective in moving the majority of us into the awakened state.
This sense of division is so deep in our minds that we started thinking… they started thinking… that anyone who attained this undivided state was some sort of special person. That’s why enlightened teachers are put on a pedestal… especially after they are dead! (Nobody really likes living enlightened people because they are too disturbing.)
If you actually listen to these enlightened guys the are always trying to tell a different story but can’t get through the noise of our assumed beliefs.
Recently I was listening to a talk by Nisargadatta. The very first thing he says is, ‘I’m an ordinary guy. I’m just a regular person who has stepped beyond division.’ Yet we turn these people into examples of perfection. The insane levels of perfection that we assign to our enlightened gurus of the past are insane and prevent us from our own awakening.
It’s one of the reasons that we do not like living gurus because they never live up to this expectation. Living gurus are disturbing. You have to be willing to be disturbed.
So, we’re going to spend a week talking about history and how it informs our divided worldview. Keep in mind that this is a series on Nonduality and Native wisdom and how they intersect. It’s not about how they are the same but about how they can help inform each other.
Native wisdom does not need to be helped. It needs to be given the space to bloom. Nonduality, on the other hand, needs help. It is the tool that can break through our divided minds. Nonduality can open us up to the place where our natural native wisdom can bloom within. Up until now it has been unaccessible to most people because we don’t have language for it.
We need this help desperately. You and the society we live in needs help in order to step back into the natural state; a place where we can use our own native wisdom. It’s important to break through our divided minds first to reach that open space where we can truly understand what we’re being told by the native wisdom keepers. Otherwise we are going to simply appropriate native teachings and keep dividing things with our thoughts. If we continue to interpret the world through our broken worldview we will continue breaking it rather than joining in the beauty and grace of being human.
Understanding our long long history will help us get there. It’s important to understand how history was written and how it was taught to us. This helps us open up to the ways it is being rewritten.
Lots of people are looking at our written history seriously and deeply and starting to tell a different story. This story of who we are is being rewritten in a way that paints a truly remarkable story of what it means to be a human being. The story most of us grew up with can start to fade away.