Paleo non-duality…
We’re trying to get back to the paleo diet, right? It seems like it’d be even more important to access that paleo mind, that paleo experience that’s inside of us, even though it’s not a logical experience.
Let’s just look at it with a little bit of lite data to start out with.
Human beings have been in our fully evolved state for eighty thousand – ninety thousand years. We were almost fully us for a million years before that – a long time. The thing that we call recent history is just a few thousand years; that’s a tiny snippet of the whole time.
Paleo Mind
So, besides running around and eating almond muffins, what was it all these paleo people were doing? They had a fully formed brain and consciousness. What did they do all day?
Our modern education system tells us that they were just savage brutes, just kind of running around naked. They didn’t know up from down. That doesn’t make sense. Why in the world would we have this vast brain capable of amazing consciousness if it wasn’t being used all that time?
We’re told that we only use a small part of our brain these days, mainly because our conveniences keep us from needing to use the whole bit. Probably so. It only makes sense that our paleo ancestors (with their almond flour muffins, yeah?) were using the full thing.
Actually, I think we all use the full thing all the time, and it’s only just this small sliver that we call the left brain thinking that constantly captures our attention. But when you really, really sit calmly for a second and think about your experience, your experience is so much broader than that. We’re able to visualize really complex things without using any thoughts at all. There’s this whole vast reservoir of our brain that’s operating all the time, just not when we’re doing math or watching a movie.
So, non-duality? They say it’s about completely dropping this critical mind, but it’s really more about getting it under control, putting it into its proper place so that you, the one who has this full total experience comes fully alive. You are you. A person who has critical brain ready to go anytime, just a little tool you can use anytime.
So, if it’s true, and of course I have no proof, that our paleo ancestors used their entire brains and lived in a non-dual state, what happened? How did we get out of it? There are a lot of Native American and Aboriginal philosophers coming forward these days with some really great explanations of this and how it happened. It happened when we started believing in individualism over community.
When people started thinking that they existed as a separate thing outside of their community. Keep in mind the community had to do with way more than just the people around – community included all my relations, which were all the animals and the rocks and the trees in the sky and the stars, and how everything constantly moved. It was all about the relationships between things.
Once our civilized ancestors started focusing on the individual, then suddenly we were able to have hierarchies because some individuals were able to position themselves in a place where they could control other individuals. Lots of people were willing to be controlled simply to survive.
So this broke our full consciousness and we started living in a state of confusion.
Then all the rest of this thing that we call modern history, and all of our religions, are an attempt to reconcile this confusion. But since it’s all based on a basic lie, we can’t reconcile it.
So, I like trying to find silly little ways to like pop ourselves out of this modern illusion and bring us back to this natural state where we’re a full human being. And when you do that, first of all, it’s a great relief, right? Second of all, you’ll start noticing what a big job we have to do to put ourselves back into a sustainable world.
That’s our job these days. That’s what we were all born to do.