Nonduality and food. In this series, we’re retelling the story of humanity. We’re sitting around the fire here, having a little talk and retelling who we are. So let’s talk about food.
It’s really interesting that nonduality teachers never talk about food, except maybe in the context of should you be a vegetarian or should you not be a vegetarian. But we never really talk about food itself. And of course (pet peeve, right?) one reason is because so many nondual teachers are men. They’re not inside the food system the way women are, because women are constantly feeding someone.
I mean, really, as a mother, that’s your job. Your body is made to be food. You start out pregnant, your body is literally feeding another human being. And then of course, breastfeeding, and then the small child, you’re feeding, feeding, feeding. A family gets together, what happens? All the women are cooking and feeding people. It seems to be this natural thing.
Every once in a while, we’ll have a guy who’s a really good cook, but then he’ll go be a chef or something really important, you know? But food, food is really a woman’s gig. As women we feel it, you know? It’s like, you’ve got to feed people. You’ve got to feed them, you know… food. (Sometimes nonduality is soooo simple.)
But let’s take it a little bit deeper. Nonduality is teaching us that we are intricately connected with everything in the whole world. Health stories tell us that we are what we eat, right? We’ll talk about that.
But go deeper. What we eat is inside of us, throughout every cell of our bodies, and we are also inside of it. We are not just consumers of food. We literally live inside the food system.
In today’s world it’s become more obscure because all our food is produced away from us. Food is produced way somewhere else and shipped in. Then we go to the store and we buy it and then we cook it and eat it. But even with that, we are literally living inside the food system.
Broaden the way you’re perceiving who you are and where you are, and you’ll see that yes, we’re “on” a planet, but there’s this little sliver of atmosphere that covers the planet. We’re “in” that sliver. That sliver is also the planet.
It’s wonderful to see pictures from outer space because you can see the atmosphere as a tiny sliver encircling the earth. It’s not very big, and we’re living in that little sliver.
As a matter of fact, gravity holds us down. Everything is held together. You literally cannot jump off the Earth. You cannot jump out of the atmosphere.
The atmosphere looks invisible but it is so solid that if a spacecraft or an asteroid comes slamming into the Earth, it hits the atmosphere and it’s so solid that it burns it up.
Air may seem like it doesn’t actually exist, but it’s there. Airplanes can fly on it. Birds can fly on it. Bugs can fly on it. You get a parachute, you can jump off a cliff and fly on the air. We’re down inside that. All of every single speck of atmosphere is actually the Earth.
The plants have created oxygen, and fire creates carbon dioxide, which, you know, creates the atmosphere. And so everything in the atmosphere, every little molecule of it comes from the Earth. The atmosphere and the Earth are not separate things. So yes, we happen to be living “on” the surface of the Earth, but not completely, because we’re “in” the atmosphere.
This different way of looking at it paints a picture of how we are on the Earth, and we are literally inside our food system. No matter where your food comes from, the fact that it grew in South America on a banana plantation, and then it was picked and shipped up here and ends up in your grocery store and then ends up in your house doesn’t matter. We are all in this together. Like a banana is not separate from you no matter how many miles away it was grown. You live within the entire unity of the Earth in which that banana grew.
So we’re living inside our food system. That’s how intricately connected we are with everything.
Now, take it a little bit deeper, because what we’re doing in this series of videos is we’re retelling the human story. We’re trying to go back before civilization and commerce and money happened. We’re going way back to where we knew literally that we were living inside the food system. Back then your daily life was all about going and getting food, bringing it back to the community, putting it together, eating it. Next day, get up, do it again.
Food. People would migrate around, following seasons and where things would be ripe and ready to eat. Even more intricately than that, native wisdom keepers are telling us now that our ancestors didn’t live as passive beings inside this food system. They knew that they were creators and gardeners of the world that they lived in. They would actually participate in enhancing the food systems that were around them. They were fabulous farmers who lived in harmony within the system of life.
We need to give our ancient mothers and fathers more credit. We’ll love our ancestors more if we give them more credit that way. It wasn’t blind. They knew they were living inside the food system.
One of the good stories I’ve heard from Native American wisdom keepers is that they would burn the prairies and the buffalo herds would follow them. White men, when we describe the way that Native Americans lived, say, “They followed the buffalo herds.” But no, the buffalo would followed the green pastures created by the burning. It was everyone participating together in relationship. The buffalo followed the people.
Now, stop for a minute and see. Did retelling that story start changing your concept of who you are, making you feel more fluid as a being, making you feel and know how you belong here on the Earth, who you are as the person who is here?
We live inside our food system, all of us together. We’re not just consumers of everything; we are participants in it. We can participate in a way that destroys the things around us, or we can use our full intelligence to participate in a way that makes everything more beautiful.
Once you start really understanding the heart of the natural human being, you’ll realize that all the places where humans live should be and could be the most beautiful places. The way we see it right now is that you have to get away from humanity to go out in nature and see beauty. But the natural human being is full of this much beauty. We can start living our lives in a way that makes immediate beauty around us. If this is our story and our consciousness then this will extend to everything we do. As we start realizing that we are participating within this vastness of generosity that is the Earth we’ll become good relatives.
The vast generosity of the earth is also in us. Each human being has this capacity.
It’s not a mystery. You know it. You know it because when you do something generous, how do you feel? When somebody else does something generous for you, how do you feel? You feel connected, right?
We live inside the food system, so don’t separate yourself from the idea of food. We are much more than consumers. We are participants in every cycle of the earth, every place.
Everything is about food. There isn’t a single cell in your body that could exist without food. We’re eating and eating and eating all the time. We can become more and more conscious of it. Retelling this story includes each of us as an ongoing act of generosity, as a participation that’s eating.
Eating is an act of immense participation. Start using it consciously to see how you’re connected to everything.
Keep it as a wondering, not an idea. It would be easy to say, “We have to go back to where everybody’s walking around and gathering their own food.” It’s easy to think that most people have to die to change the planet. Our minds have stuck us in a loop where we can only see an apocalyptic future.
Or we could start realizing that right now, right here, in this exact moment, in this exact place where we are, our food connects us to the entire planet. When you sit down and eat a meal, where did all those pieces come from? They came from everywhere. Like the salt… put a little dash of salt on your food, put a little dash of pepper on, they each came from someplace else.
So nonduality and food. We can completely rewrite the human story by becoming fascinated with how we live inside the food system, how we are in life, not consumers of it, how every act that we do creates something. It always happens, but our awareness can change. We can live unconsciously, or we can live consciously.
The more we rewrite our story to see how we belong here the more we can create beauty with everything we do. The closer we’re going to be to accessing ourselves as a real human being. And that’s what nonduality means: stepping away from the false mind, stepping away from the false face into this place of awakening.