Our brains are hardwired for belief because we want simple answers. Simple. Like, why am I feeling this way? Why did such and such just happen?
We have this right-brain/left-brain thing going on all the time. All the many nodes of the brain, our perceptions, our memories, everything we’ve seen, everything we’ve been told is hard wired in. We want it all to make sense.
This is why non-duality is so valuable. Because duality can never make sense. Duality can never be simple.
Like, right now, here we are. I’m writing this in 2022. It is amazing what scientist and anthropologist and neurologist are discovering about what it means to be human. About how to live the very best human life you possibly can. They are getting very close to answering. Who are you? What are you?
But it’s 2022 now. Very soon it’s going to be 2023. New things are going to be discovered. It’s infinite. It’s infinite the amount of things that can be discovered, that will be discovered. It’s infinite the amount of ways we can put all the information that we have together. It’s infinite what is going to be discovered in the future.
Complexity is Infinite
If you’ve watched many of my previous videos, I have one on zero. It’s about how we didn’t know about zero until just a few centuries ago. It was a mystery for centuries but right now it’s taught in kindergarten. You learned zero as you were being taught reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The concept of zero has completely changed everything about our lives. Without zero, we couldn’t have gone to the moon. It took centuries for humans to understand it. It was actually zero that all the Eastern mystics were discovering as the inner experience. Who am I? I am zero. I’m nothing.
Not Knowing
How do you live your every day life not knowing anything? Really, we can’t do that. We have to know something.
One of my experiments is “Where is your spatula?” Where is your spatula? You really need to know where your spatula is. Hopefully after you use it you put it back away because otherwise, your house is a total mess.
Don’t confuse knowing and not knowing. There is a part of our brain that has to know complex things in order to live. There is another part that doesn’t need complexity. What’s really cool about Nonduality is that you can learn to shift between the two. It’s OK.
The Shift
Relax. Let your left Yacky brain, the thinking brain, just go for it. The left brain always tries to figure things out, to put things in order, to come up with simple revelations about what life is. Let it be. Let it do it’s job. It’s not you.
Meanwhile, we have this other part of ourselves that is completely comfortable with not knowing. That part of you always knows who you are. It sees the mysteries of life.
We can learn to shift between the two.
We can see what’s useful, and we can see what is nothing and unknowable. So anytime you’re presented with new information you can stop as the very first thing and realize “I don’t know.”
Have it be your default to realize at first that you don’t completely know. Always start at: I don’t know if that is true, but I can try to get as close to it as I can. I want to find out, but right now don’t know.
Be kind to your brain
Our brains are hardwired for belief. We habitually go for that first. We want something really simple to explain the complexity of the world.
Yes, that’s how we’re made. But we don’t have to be stuck in that spot. That’s what the teaching of not knowing is about. Taking the stance “I don’t completely know.” I don’t know if that is true, but I can try to get as close to it as I can. I want to find out if it’s useful.
Taking the nondual stance means being an explorer.