Nonduality is ancient.
Hi, everyone. I am Ma Prem Zareen, and this is a series of short videos going through all the concepts of what nonduality is and isn’t. It’s the same ideas I worked through in my short book The Daily Book of Awakening.
I’m going through all those different ideas and putting a little more juice into them. The reason is because we need to be told over and over and over what it is we’re looking for. If we’re looking for something that nonduality is not, we’re never going to find it. And if we do have an idea of what it is, then we’re going to know when we’re going in the right direction.
This is what led to my own awakening—listening to my teacher, Osho. He talked over and over, day after day after day saying, Enlightenment is this. Enlightenment is not that. He went through stories after stories, slowly letting the idea sink in that I was looking for myself. So that when I saw myself, I knew what it was. I knew what it was I was looking at—or a better way to say it—I knew who was looking at it: me.
This is what Nisargadatta says at the very beginning of his book I Am That. He’s asked, How did you become so wonderful? He said, I don’t know. I just trusted my guru. So what was it he trusted? He trusted what the guru was telling him.
We don’t have gurus today, so I’m going through all these little things to help dissolve ideas that you have. And you’ll find all these little videos in my Daily Nonduality playlist.
Ancient Reality
Nonduality is ancient, ancient, ancient. And if you stand back and look at this logically for one second, it totally makes sense. Human beings have been here a long, long time—before civilization even happened, before any sort of writing even happened, before any sort of religion even happened. A hundred thousand years—even more than that, like a million years—we were almost us, is what anthropologists tell us.
And now, after the hundred thousand years we’ve been us is this tiny little sliver of time that we are in now. This mind numbing industrial revolution that’s made us not know who we are anymore.
During all our deep time, we knew we were living in unity because we weren’t destructive. During all that time, we were simply, each of us, blended into the reality of our lives. We’re telling that story wrong. So many of our stories today look back and say, Oh, Stone Age—they were miserable, they were being chased by lions every day, and that’s why we have adrenaline. And it just simply can’t be. We must have been doing really, really well all that time because we did really, really well.
We spread all over the whole Earth, and if you go and find the indigenous stories of the little pockets of natural people that are left, thousands and thousands of miles away from each other with no contact, they all have the same story of unity. They tell how human beings are related to everything, how we’re part of everything. How the trees can speak to us, how Coyote can speak to us, how Father Sky and Mother Earth interact together to create the place where we live. The indigenous story is how we are part of everything.
And literally, that’s the story of nonduality. That’s literally the nondual state: to know that you are part of everything and there is nothing in you that is separate.
So, nonduality is ancient, ancient, ancient.
Take yourself way, way back. Let the belief systems of all the history that we’ve been told about humans—the wars, the plagues, the governments, and the kings—dissolve away. Let’s go back to when we were simple, simple, simple and living everywhere in harmony.
Literally… living in harmony with reality is the definition of nonduality. Knowing it—not doing it by accident—but knowing that you’re in harmony with everything. Imagine living in a way that from the day you were born, you were told: Everything’s connected. You can listen to all of the other beings in reality speak to us. This is how we live in harmony. This is who you are.
This is how humans were raised for almost all of our history—until this very short little sliver of destruction that we’re living in right now. Hopefully, we’re trying to get through it, get past it, and stop being this being of destruction.
We need to go back to being the human of harmony.
This ancient, ancient, ancient story tells us that it really is true: nonduality is your birthright. It’s the way you were born.
You can be pointed in that direction, even though you weren’t raised that way. If you’re constantly listening to actual stories of what nonduality is and how it relates—if you’re always listening to these stories—then your mind is built to understand that, and you will get there fully.
Oh yes, I am part of this ancient, ancient reality of human beings, and we can all be awake and live in the world in a totally different way than we are right now.