Retelling the human story is vital today because if we want to start grappling with the way we’re living on the planet and how we’re living with each other, we need to know who we are.
We can’t know who we are as individuals if we don’t understand who humanity is because, ultimately, what we learn in nonduality is that things are not separate in any way. Everything is interconnected, even through this thing that we call time. We need to start really diving into who we are.
Fortunately, all of us are helping. There is fabulous new information coming to us from archaeology and from Indigenous people all over the planet, who remember who they are because they are still part of their ancestral community from the beginning of time.
It’s important to understand that history did not start with civilization. This is what we were taught in school. Actually, if you look at the history they teach us in school, it’s really just the history of wars. It’s not the history of people. It’s whoever invented the best new weapon and managed to conquer as many people as possible. No wonder we’re messed up if that’s what we’re taught we are. But broaden the time frame. Move us all the way back into deep, deep, deep history, and we can see better who we are as human beings and as each of us living on the planet.
We have been around in our exact DNA configuration for at least 100,000 years. If you go back even further, you’ll find that evolution works in small steps and small changes, and every single iteration of us has been complete and total. Go back 200,000 years, and we’re not that different. We can easily imagine our ancestors back a million years. When we put ourselves in this deep time frame, it’s actually very relaxing because we can start to see ourselves as part of the natural world, which created us.
We grew inside and with the forests of Africa. We know we came from this natural world, and we became immensely social animals who took care of each other so well that we were able to evolve the big brains we have today. We can’t run fast, we have awkward bodies, and we’re not the best at anything except maybe thinking. And even thinking can go very, very wrong.
This is the story we need to look at when we’re studying nonduality because human beings lived in touch with nature to the degree that we were able to walk around the entire planet, live in every possible ecosystem, live in harmony with that ecosystem, and even enhance that ecosystem. Then, all of a sudden, we went crazy—not that long ago, maybe about 4,000 years ago, when this thing we call civilization started.
That’s when we started imagining that we were separate from the world to the point where we could own the world, and pieces of the world. That’s what we call agriculture—when people started owning property enough to grow things that they then felt they owned.
Sidebar: What we’re starting to find out now is that Indigenous people all over the world had what we should call agriculture for hundreds of thousands of years. They assisted plants in growing and herds of animals in thriving. They lived within that ecosystem without owning any piece of land.
We started owning things, and then we started having hierarchies where some people were better than other people, higher than other people, and owned more things than other people. It’s just led to total madness, and that’s what we’re in now.
Let’s talk about all of this in the context of nonduality. What we’re trying to do is get back to that original self of the person who lived harmoniously within their tribe and the Earth. That intelligence is still alive in each of us, in our DNA. That’s actually the thing that drives us all day long. This separate mind that has grown up and feels like a huge veil in front of our eyes is tiny, fragile, and easy to break.
This is the story of nonduality: how to break the hold that this so-called false self has on us. The reason that nondual teachings have not been very effective with people—and let’s be honest, they haven’t—is because of the context they are put in. They’re presented as if Enlightenment is an amazing, rare happening that happens to an individual. But that’s not what it is at all.
Even all the enlightened people keep trying to say, “Hey, it’s just coming back to normal. It’s coming back to your natural self. It’s dropping the false self and coming to the natural self.” We’re going back to that ancient human that we are designed naturally designed to be.
So, let’s rewrite this story of who we are, and then we can rewrite the story of how we become fully ourselves: totally natural, awake human beings, all living our lives the way we were meant to.