Nonduality is… Skin.
You’re like… whaaaaat?
Well, just think about it. The last thing in the world you would ever want completely sterile is skin. Yeah, it’s kind of nice to be clean, right? But completely sterilized skin? You’d probably be dead because skin is the interface between us and the entire world. Skin is porous. It has chemicals from inside us. Oils that come out and keep the skin alive. Stuff from the outside constantly interfaces with our skin and even penetrates it in various ways.
We require dirt to be healthy. They have discovered that if you keep a child in a very, very sterile environment, they don’t develop an immune system. In fact, a baby that is born cesarean never has as good of an immune system as a baby born regularly because regular birth is so much dirtier and messier.
So… Skin.
Kind of holds us in, right? But it’s also an interface through which pieces of me go out – sweat, moisture. Pieces of the outside world come in — Moisture, dirt. I mean, you can moisturize yourself, right? So, it’s very porous.
It’s really hard to completely define where my skin stops and everything else starts. As I walk around, I’m shedding little pieces of skin everywhere, so there’s like little pieces of me everywhere, and there’s little pieces of everywhere coming into me.
Then there’s breath. You can breathe in as well, right? –Deep breath– I just inhaled who knows what? And exhale… something from inside of me went out.
So, we as human beings are way more porous than we would like to imagine, or perhaps more porous than we have been told, since birth. We are a total interface with everything around us.
It’s not just skin; our minds are exactly the same thing. Particularly our critical language mind, what we like to call the left brain, is totally porous. Ideas come from somewhere else. They can come into my mind and create new ideas and fit together in different ways. And then things come out of my mind and go into the world through various ways: through me speaking, through things I make with my hands.
As a matter of fact, you’re sitting there right now watching this YouTube video, so something that I am doing is accessing your mind, changing your mind, maybe in dramatic ways. Maybe you’re going, “Oh wow, I never saw that before,” or maybe it’s just a very subtle thing like butterfly wings flapping.
There is nothing about us that’s fixed. There is nothing I can point to and actually say, “This is just mine.”
That’s what nonduality is about. It is stopping that idea that something is truly separate from me. I am totally integrated into everything, but more specifically, I am not all those other things. I’m not my skin, right? I’m not just my skin. I am not just my breath; my breath constantly changes.
I’m not my thoughts.
This is what nonduality is specifically about – because we tend to get hypnotized by our thoughts way more than we get hypnotized by our skin.
Since childhood. We are told, “You are this, you are that.” We have the idea of ‘mine.’
But who is it? Who is the ‘me’ owning this cookie when I’m two years old? Who is the ‘me’ owning my toy? Who is the ‘me’ owning my house, owning my guitar, my drum, anything?
There is no boundary of ‘me.’ The skin doesn’t really stop anywhere. The mind isn’t located anywhere. All these things are so intertwined.
Specifically with nonduality it’s a tool. If you can unhook from the idea that you are this separate mind, then the whole rest of your brain can come alive. Then you can relax. The whole rest of your being, has no problem whatsoever being completely intertwined and dissolved into everything else. Your skin has no problem whatsoever with the fact that it’s constantly shedding little pieces of itself. It has no problem, whatsoever, that dirt gets on.
We’re so integrated. And when we can drop what they call the illusion of separation, that’s when we become a full person, fully awake. The only way that I know how to get there is to have one moment of complete silence where you’re actually seeing the vastness of nothing. Because when you’re seeing that nothing, all that’s left is the you that’s seeing it, and you are that nothing as well.