So, we’re sitting around the fire here and retelling the human story from a perspective of nonduality. First of all, nonduality would mean we’re never fixed on an idea because we know that ideas only come from the mind. There’s a true inner being in all of us that needs no idea to know, and there is a way to live in the world where our ideas are actually fluid enough that we can create a beautiful world with each other and get along. This is the point—this should be the ultimate point of nonduality: to find a way where we aren’t stuck in our mind and our concepts because we know the center of ourselves, the place where we come from.
So, let’s talk about the story of how we got here very briefly, to this divided state that we live in, and maybe some clues as to how to get out. We’re told the story that human beings evolved from apes, apes evolved from lizards, and lizards evolved from single-cell creatures. They all came out of the ocean, and then human beings also evolved from apes. We were cavemen, then we finally got bronze and entered the Bronze Age, then we got a little smarter and entered the Iron Age, and then we got a little smarter and entered the Enlightenment. We actually teach that human history began with the written word, so it’s this trajectory of us just getting smarter and smarter until now we’re us.
But reverse that. Basically, what that’s telling us is that our ancestors were idiots—that, going back through the time of human history, people get dumber and dumber until we’re monkeys, until we’re lizards, until we’re just this dumb, no-brain creature floating in the ocean. So we see our past as this great ignorance. Let’s change that around to where every single bit of it is brilliance. There wasn’t a single moment where consciousness wasn’t bursting forth in the life on Earth. For human beings, let’s put an easy number on it: let’s say 100,000 years ago we hit this final physical evolution that is us, and those people then were brilliant, fully formed, awake human beings.
Now we can start seeing the timeline from a different perspective. We see that for 90,000 years we were able to live on the planet without the written word. How were we able to do everything we did? We literally started from Africa and walked around the entire planet. These primitive people that we usually assign as being really ignorant built incredible seafaring boats and sailed to Australia. People sailed across the Pacific, and people went from Alaska down to South America because of their brilliant, highly evolved consciousness. They were able to expand their understanding to the point where they could see waves and directions and knew how to live inside the earth. They were literally living inside their food system, not separate from it at all, because they knew how to use their full consciousness.
It was only a few tiny years ago that what we call civilization came and taught us how to be divided from this world. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that civilization has dumbed us down because it started teaching us that we could use this very small part of our brain that contains language and call that knowledge. They started defining everything rather than understanding everything, and so our consciousness got smaller and smaller until we are now in this state of confusion because we are so far removed from our roots. That’s a different story, right?
So if we start looking at ourselves with this different story, the way to start bringing ourselves back to ourselves—what we call enlightenment—becomes more clear. Deep down, each of us is this awake, natural human being that we were born to be. Each of us has this capacity for this vast knowing that is way beyond what textbooks can teach us, way beyond any verbal language knowledge. If you sit with yourself for just a moment and start appreciating the depth of your intelligence, you can start seeing this in yourself. All the things that you’ve learned, that you’ve really learned, have been learned in spite of language, not because of it.
Take something as boring as math or history. Math is a good example. You have to memorize basic things—what’s two plus two, what’s five times five, all these simple things—but then as you start getting these concepts in your mind, you start using them without thought in meaningful ways in your life. Say you have a pie, there are seven people, and you want to cut the pie and give everybody a piece. You’re not really thinking through the math of it completely. Maybe one person is a little kid and doesn’t need as big of a piece, and one person is on a diet and needs a smaller piece. We’re able to take our consciousness and use all these concepts that we’ve learned to live our lives.
We are way more brilliant than we give ourselves credit for. When we retell our story to put ourselves into this timeline of magnificent humanity living in harmony on the earth for 100,000 years, it becomes very simple to start seeing that we can do that again easily, even keeping all the knowledge that we have. By re-understanding our place in the world and who we are, we achieve nonduality and enlightenment. This means coming back to yourself, becoming the fully awake human being that you were born to be. Yes, you haven’t lived the most perfect situation every minute of your day, but so what? We’re resilient, we’re tough, and we can overcome these things.
Rewrite that story to put yourself in this long, long timeline, and just because this is the way we’re wired, you can start touching and learning from these ancestors of long ago. When you put yourself inside that field of understanding, the world becomes broader, and you fit in it better. The more we relax into who we are as this expansive, interconnected being, the closer we are to that moment of “Oh, I’m me. I’m here. There’s nothing, and yet there’s everything. Nothing needs to be defined,” and that’s almost the definition of enlightenment—that it can’t be defined and doesn’t need to be defined, because it’s just right there.