If you have done any studying of Nonduality or Eastern Traditions, you have probably heard about the veil that many enlightened masters use to describe the unenlightened state. They say it’s like you have a veil over your face that you can’t quite see through. This Veil is all of your conditionings, all the thoughts of separation that you have. We can’t see this veil over our eyes, and we get very addicted to this veil.
So the question arises, ‘How do I get it off?’
Enlightenment Masters say things like, ‘It just goes by itself. The wind will blow it away. It’s a very light thing.’ All true, but relatively useless.
We’re working on a series on how Native wisdom and Non-duality intersect, and we’re spending a whole week talking about babies and how people are raised.
We’ve done a few videos talking about what I like to call “the bubble.” It’s also called the evolved nest. This idea is telling us that human beings used to be raised in such a tight-knit community that everyone was able to grow from infant to adult without fear and become solid independent human beings who all knew who they were and how they fit in the world.
In our culture, that doesn’t happen. We’re raised in a very linear fashion. There’s a mom and a dad. There’s often a lot of tension. There’s discipline and even child rearing practices. Particularly in Christian cultures you’re raised from the very beginning told that you’re full of sin, that something’s wrong with you. We all get yelled at, we get various traumas. All these things are what causes this veil to come over our our eyes.
As an illustration I’m going to tell a little story. Maybe it’ll make some sense, maybe it won’t. But I remember the very first time the veil came over my consciousness. I was very young, like maybe one and a half, maybe two – a little little girl. My mom had a friend who also had a little girl my age. So, my mom and the friend had got together and decided, ‘Let’s get the two little girls together to play. That’ll be so cute.’ And so, my mom got a dress and dressed me up. You know, one of those cutsie dresses little girls wear, with all the frills and a bow in my hair. I remember shiny white shoes that click and move in front of me when I walk.
She must have been telling me this story about how wonderful it was going to be. I will be meeting this little girl and we’re going to play, and it’s going to be so cute and wonderful.
We go over to the friend’s house. We walk in the door, and the little girl gets one look at me. She’s also all dressed up, and she gets this look of just total rage on her face. She comes running over to me screaming, ‘I hate you!’ She pushes me, and I fall down. I remember the sensation of this grey fog coming down over my mind. The veil literally, slipping down over my face.
Many years later, after years and years of meditation, the veil lifted. Now I’m able to look back at it from a point of view of the veil being gone. and see it for what it is. But what made this happen? It was very distinct. I can remember myself kind of curling back in myself, and the veil came down. It wasn’t because the little girl had hated me, I mean that was part of it, right? But the thing that caused it was the confusion of a moment that didn’t make sense.
In my little two-year-old mind it didn’t make sense. I had been told that we were going to be so beautiful and we were going to play together and it was going to be so cute. Instead, I’m met with this intense rage, yelled at and pushed over.
It wasn’t like I was afraid, I wasn’t really hurt… it was the lie that confused me. The more I look back at it and think about it, it was the lie that I had been told that dropped the veil. This subtle, subtle lie. It was so subtle that no little two-year-old could work their way through it, right? And I had been told this by the person I trusted the most in the whole world, my mom.
I didn’t blame her either. The world cracked and I ran and hid behind her legs. It wasn’t like I was then afraid of her and hated her, right? Because I was too confused to put any of that together. It was this break in my psyche that caused the crack. All of a sudden the world didn’t make sense.
Of course something like this has happened to every single one of us. It was a very minor, small thing that happened to me. Much worst has certainly happened to others. It hardly even counts on the scale of traumas.
We can be absolutely sure that that was not the only trauma I ever faced as a child. We’re all getting bashed and hit by things that don’t make sense as we grow up. Some things break us, some things don’t.
I have decided that, more than likely, pretty much… maybe… the thing that drives us crazy as lies. Human beings can handle anything else; we can handle floods and fire and war and whatever, but it’s the lies that break us. When things don’t make sense, that’s what drives us crazy. That’s what causes this veil to drop. That’s what drops us into this loop of confusion that goes around and around in our heads.
That’s the loop we face as meditators. This is the darkness we are trying to get ourselves out of.
I’m sure you’ve noticed this loop if you’ve ever sat and meditated. It goes something like this; you’re sitting there meditating… then boom, the loop of thoughts comes. You relax and it goes away. Then the next thing you know you’re flipping around back in it again… oh, oh, thoughts! Looping, looping. You come back to yourself and relax again and try to stop it …oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, meditate again. Eventually you’re relaxed and then the next thing you know… oh, oh, oh, thoughts in a loop!
Right? Meditation can be like that. That loop just catches you over and over because so many pieces of life don’t fit together.
Just like when I was a little girl met with that rage. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense.
Looking back on it, from an adult persepective, it makes total sense. That poor little girl that hit me. She had been told the same story: ‘You and this little girl are going to be so cute.’ Then all of a sudden, this person walks into her house, invading her space, all dressed up in a pretty little dress and the confusion spills out of her, ‘I hate you.’
Can’t blame her, right? She was transfixed by the same lie.
Another interesting thing about this story is that it shows how deeply our world views get imprinted in us when we’re really little. I ended up turning into a tomboy. You cannot dress me up. Don’t try to dress me up! Nothing makes me more uncomfortable than dressing me up. It’s not because I’m anti-dress-up. It’s because dressing up makes me feel fake. The second I feel fake I’m confronted with that lie.
Now, look at most of the other girls, right? They got dressed up and they must have been imprinted with a positive experience. Something told them that dressing up is really good. Every time you dress up, you’ll be loved. And so, they love to dress up. The ‘Oh, you’re so cute.’ moment worked for them.
See how deeply imprinted these conditionings are? We get them so young and then act on them our whole lives.
That’s what we’re talking about here in the intersection of Nonduality and Native wisdom. Native wisdom is showing us how a human being can be raised inside a bubble of such interconnection that there’s no lies. Nonduality is showing how to find a place where reality makes sense again. If you’ve not been raised in that bubble, if you’ve been raised with lies so that your mind is in chaos, then Nonduality shows us how we can come to a place of stopping. A place where the lies dissolve. Nonduality and enlightenment teachings show how we can stop the chaos of the mind, step out of it, and start choosing your own life.
That’s why we need both these things together. Native wisdom shows us the vision of humanity living in harmony. Nonduality is the tool that helps us get to this place where we can start creating this integrated world together.
Hopefully, that story makes a little bit of sense and kind of helps. Hopefully, it starts popping up memories of divisive things that happened to you.
Native cultures didn’t have lies.
Let’s pause a moment here and go way, way, way back in time before the conquering nations came. In the Americas this is just a few hundred years ago. In the European continent it’s thousands of years. In the middle east it’s thousands and thousands of years.
Here’s our picture: Everybody’s living in these integrated communities. From when you’re very, very young, you are taught how to live, how to eat, how to find things to eat, how to tan a hide, how to live and how to be. Nothing is a lie because everything is real. Even the myths and the stories are real because they’re not given out of context of the place where you live and the integration of the whole world together.
In these evolved nests we would have a true integrated humanity that survived for a hundred thousand years, a million years. We lived this way for however long we’ve been telling stories. Probably since we stood on two feet millions of years ago. It’s a natural place where there are no existential no lies. This is a place where lying about the nature of reality doesn’t exist, where no one would be faced with that fundamental lie that I was hit with at two years old – where something that my mother had told me was so obviously not true.
It is possible to live in this fundamentally truthful way again. We won’t get there as a community in our lifetimes, and pretending to be there won’t make it happen. A full shift is needed first. Nonduality is the tool to help us step into this as quickly as possible, one at a time, within our current paradigm, so we can start building this different life.
Nonduality is useless if it is a practice that’s going to take you 30 years to get to some weird Enlightenment… It’s useless if the end result is you sitting around doing nothing but drinking bliss. I mean… is that what you really want? Or do you want to be a dynamic, awake, fully living person in the here and now?
That’s a story about the veil. It can lift, and we can be here as human beings. You aren’t completely stuck by your upbringing. At least I hope so.