The vast majority of our consciousness is not being used in today’s world. We have opted to turn off what you might call the silent part of our knowing in favor of the loud, what we would call the mind, the logical mind. But the logical mind is there to analyze what comes to us through this huge capacity of silence, of listening. We’re sitting around the fire here, and we are talking about retelling the human story. As soon as we start seeing that the vast, huge history of humanity is full of people—human beings who were awake, spiritual beings in tune with the world—then we can start learning how to create ourselves in a way that can live in harmony with our planet. We were designed to live in harmony with each other and with the planet.
Now, a quick backtrack: harmony doesn’t mean always being nice, never fighting, never having little wars, never doing anything bad. It means constantly being able to come back into a balance where things work, where we work in relationship with things rather than as individual consumers of life. So don’t ever think that I’m saying that all of our ancient caveman ancestors lived these perfectly peaceful lives. What we’ve been told is the ideal of humanity. It’s like, no, they just simply lived in harmony with the way the world is, and the world is constantly changing. It’s huge.
It requires a vast interconnection with the people that we know—we would say the people in our tribe—and with all the other beings and the plants and the way the world works. So rewrite the story that our ancestors were not these stupid cavemen just sitting around wishing they had iPhones. No, they lived healthy, interconnected lives, and they always had elders. The old people in human communities are the ones that both retain and pass along information to everyone. We evolved to live in a verbal learning society, so the elders would tell us how to live good lives, how to be people who stay in harmony because they would have witnessed what happens when you go out of harmony and the steps that it takes to come back into harmony many times in their lives.
So think of our ancestors as just revolving a vast knowledge of how to be a good human being, because good human beings stay in harmony. We just know that—we, each of us, just have an inner knowing of what balance is. So how much brain does it take to live in a natural world and always be coming back into balance? Just think: our ancestors lived inside the food system. They weren’t just consumers of things. They weren’t just walking around saying, “Oh, there’s a plant; let’s eat that plant.” No, they participated in the world that they were in. They were fabulous agriculturalists, but in a natural way where land wasn’t owned. They just, over centuries, learned how to enhance the world that they were in.
So pause for a minute, and you’ll notice that if you relax, this small little thinking, analyzing brain can sit down and kind of go into the background. Then you can start feeling just the vastness of your actual consciousness, of how wise you actually are. You’ve been learning your whole life. That’s where this actual wisdom resides. So feel that deep, deep interconnection that starts giving you a glimmer of how much consciousness we can actually use. What would it take to really be in harmony with the people around you? What would it take to always know how to participate? Like, you walk into a place, something always needs to be done. How would you just know what needs to be done? How would your consciousness be if you lived in a constant state of learning? And not only were you in this constant state of learning, but you had elders who were always teaching you—you had, you know, aunties and uncles who were always teaching you—and then you’re also learning from the children and the people that you are participating in raising. So everyone would constantly be growing in wisdom.
What would it be like to live where your thinking brain is not constantly being stimulated, where you could actually take the time to let something seep into your knowledge, where you didn’t need constant stimulation or you would be bored, where we didn’t think that knowledge was just facts being pushed into our brain? What if we saw knowledge as this huge, vast interconnected force that could seep into us and go in and out? Because as it comes in, we also share it, because we are totally interconnected and in relationship with everything around us.
So do this instead of meditation. In meditation, what we do so often is we start battling our mind and try to turn it off. Instead, just ignore that tiny little noisy thing and feel the huge, huge, huge vast consciousness which is inside you, and let that start coming to the forefront. The more we access this true inner wisdom in ourselves, the more this false self just becomes thin and drops away. One thing people don’t know is that the false self, the unenlightenment, takes a lot of energy to maintain. You stop maintaining it, and it just goes away. And that’s what enlightenment is—when the false self has dropped, and now you are living as the awakened being you are always meant to be, that you always are. Let that come to the forefront as much as possible.