Our sense of duality, of being separate from things, is so acute these days, so dramatic, even. One of the reasons for that is because we don’t get into nature anymore. Even nature is something that’s way out there. We don’t have the sense that it’s right here, and so we don’t have a sense of ourselves.
We’re so busy; we go from thing to thing to thing, and that busyness kind of engulfs our lives from when we’re very small. The goal of all parents is to never have a child have a moment of boredom. A child, if a child’s bored, that’s like some terrible disaster. But really, boredom is a state of being in harmony with no outside influence happening upon you, where you have to be for a time. And that used to be a natural state of human beings, that we would have long periods of time where there’s nothing going on.
Hopefully, you’re hanging out with other people and talking, and, you know, kind of living in a nice, calm hum. And we never have this nice, calm hum anymore. Everything’s velocity; cars are going, going. We’re constantly going from here to here to here to there. It makes our sense of separation very acute. And um, the result of this is this feeling of intense suffering that everybody has because if you slow down for a second, the suffering arises. Partly because we’ve never dealt with it.
We’re so busy; we’re running around, running around, running around. But it’s also kind of a natural, that natural human beingness, suffering. It’s like, like um, like boredom. It’s this hum you can kind of be in this hum. And if you interpret the things that are going through your mind and the things that are going through your body, your various emotions, as suffering, then you’re going to have so much suffering.
The only time you’re not having suffering is when you’re actually feeling happy. That’s why we go to parties and everybody dances and we all do too many drugs and, you know, we’re constantly ingesting things to try to make ourselves feel good because we interpret anything else other than good vibrant happiness as suffering when it’s kind of like that’s life, you know, sometimes you’re sitting there, sometimes nothing’s going on, sometimes you’re waiting in line, so many things, sometimes you’re not in your perfect relationship, and so you interpret that as this horrible suffering.
We aren’t given the tools of how to be effective human beings; we’re given the tools of how to be effective employees, right? How to make lots of money, how to, you know, everything you hear on YouTube, you look at all the videos, how to make a $1,000 a day, you know, all this stuff, everything, everything, everything, trying to overcome this suffering that we feel because we aren’t in touch with who we are. And Who We Are, by that I mean you’re not a separate thing.
We’re so focused on the separateness of ourselves that we rarely notice the intricate nature of how we are all intertwined with each other. And this is why we can’t have Community; why Community becomes so difficult because you can’t have a community with a whole bunch of different separate people in it because everybody’s my needs, my needs, my needs. I’m not getting fulfilled, I don’t have this, it costs me too much, I did too much, you didn’t do enough, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
This is why communities fall to pieces. This is why then we believe that we can’t have communities unless we have a strong leader that keeps us all together because as the way we are is like small children who can’t get along because of this sense of separation. That sounds kind of hopeless, right? But maybe it’s not. I think that this acute sense of separateness that we have is also very, very fragile like a very fine vase. It gets the tiniest, tiniest little crack in it, it’s going to shatter, right?
That’s the way so much of our separation is. That’s why so many people are on a spiritual search, usually very young. We realize, wait, something’s wrong, you know? Maybe you’ll get a sense of unity, but this is not being taught to you in your, in your churches or out in your work or at school. And you’re like, wait a second, I tasted this thing. What is this thing? And so we go, and we start searching for it. So this sense of separation is very, very fragile. And you have to work hard actually at keeping it in place.
Again, this is why we’re always taught to kind of chill, slow down because when we slow down, the crack will grow bigger and bigger so that we can start looking out. As that happens, when you slow down, this thing that you call suffering may feel bigger because you haven’t been looking at it. The secret there is if you’re feeling suffering, look right at it. What is this? What is this that I’m feeling? Do it also with happiness. You’re at a party, you’re feeling good, like look at that happiness. What is it? What is it? What is this expansive feeling? The expansive feeling is because when you’re feeling happiness, you’re willing to allow life to come through you.
When you’re feeling suffering, you want to clamp down and prevent it from happening. But you can have that sense of expansion no matter how you’re feeling. And then it’s easy to start getting into this place where aliveness is simply happening in you. And when you let that bubble forth in the reality that we all share, then you’re going to be able to start reaching out to other people. And the more we reach out to other people, the less we’re going to feel this sense of separateness.
And the more we reach out to animals, if you have a pet, look how easy it is to feel communication with your pet. With your plants, go outside. Here’s a bonus tip: we think that nature is out there, like we think that, you know, Enlightenment is in the future or something like that. But nature constantly comes in your house. We call it dirt. Notice the dirt in your house. Where did that come from? It’s constantly coming in, constantly coming in, constantly coming in, right? Nature is everywhere. It’s full of, it’s through us. It’s full of us.
We breathe in the air; we breathed in nature. We drink water; we eat food. Boom, we are full of nature everywhere. So we can notice this, and all these things make that sense of separation start to crack and go away. So we have this dramatic feeling of separateness only when we’re looking at it. Second, we look beyond it. Everything’s connected. That there is the secret of nonduality.