The stories that we’ve been told about who we are are so deep in our consciousness that it takes a lot of work to get them out. One thing that you’ll notice about me is that I’m kind of snarky about, and critical of, the stories that come to us about Nonduality. That’s because those teachings aren’t doing a good job of freeing us from ourselves.
Our last video was about how the conquerors, the winners, write history—this is true in Nonduality as well. The teachings we hear about Nonduality, all the beautiful gurus that we have, everything we have to study about it, comes from a small handful of men on a bit of land in the east who have one way or another become famous teaching it. It’s a very small sliver of a point of view. What would happen if we were hearing more voices?
All of our enlightenment stories come from Eastern cultures that are very hierarchical. These are all conquered cultures to start out with. Ancient native cultures were not hierarchical.
It’s something to contemplate. We’ve been given this interpretation by these particular gurus, from a particular culture, in a particular language, about what it means to reach this state of enlightenment. This eastern culture is also the guidebook for what you do afterwards, and our beliefs about how an enlightened person should look.
Here’s the story in a nutshell—you become enlightened, and then you sit there happy and in bliss the rest of your life. You look so blissful and happy that people draw around you. Then you teach something so obscure and rare that hardly anyone gets it. Only the most special will even try.
But what about everyone and everything else? What about the other-than-human beings? What about the earth and the sky? It’s all about me, me, me.
This enlightenment story is very disconnected from everything else because it comes from a society that is disconnected to start with. Mother earth, Father sky, babies, spiders, rocks, all our relations, are not included in this story. We need to work on rewriting these stories.
I’m going to point you at a lot of reading. I have numerous books listed on this site. The one I want to talk about right now is ‘The Dawn of Everything.’ It is a new history of humanity and it’s written by these two guys who were both anthropologists and they’re both named David.
Throughout their lifetimes more and more information kept getting uncovered in their field. These two are brilliant—a couple of Jewish guys, actually. They liked to argue and brainstorm. They’d get together and they’d talk about new discoveries, “Look at this, look at that.” After a while they started noticing inconsistencies between the evidence and the story they were supposed to be telling. Their conversations turned to, “You know, that doesn’t make sense.”
The story that they had been told as anthropologists is the same story we’ve been told about history. Human beings wandered around without any civilization. As time goes on populations grow. Chiefs start becoming more powerful, and then we have large tribes, and then it evolves into cities, and then cities evolve into culture, and finally, we end up with the written word and we invent agriculture and metalworking. Eventually true civilization comes along.
These two guys realize, “‘”Wait a minute, this doesn’t match up with the evidence that we’re seeing on the ground in archaeological sites.”
So, they rewrote the history of humanity. Like… literally. Their book is titled: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
In a nutshell, they’re examining hundreds of thousands of years of evidence—and civilizations everywhere. They say that a truer story was that people were living great lives everywhere. Over and over they’d start coming together and start building cities.
In order to survive through time items have to be hard and solid. As far as archaeology is concerned the only things we find is something that’s been built in stone. The evidence of what it was like before cities is slim. But we see from the cities themselves that people would come together and start building things. They would start moving rocks around, put cities together, and live in larger groups. Then, over and over and over again, all across the globe, these cities would get to a certain point and people would just walk away.
Over an over rocks build up and then people seem to go, ‘Nah, we don’t like that,’ and they just walk away. After a while (maybe they’d forget) people would start building stuff up again. Then boom, they’d shut it down and walk away.
The beginnings of these cities showed no evidence of hierarchy. When hierarchy began they would pack up and walk away.
So our two scholars changed their questions. Instead of, “Why did it take so long for civilization to build up, and who were the brilliant people who did it?” They started asking, “Why did we stop walking away? What made it so we couldn’t just walk away?”
Their conclusion was that the natural human tendency is to always go back to the natural way to live, but when the walls get too big we can’t walk away any more. They say the way to save humanity now is to take down the walls and trust we’ll work it out.
One of the stories that they tell is about the United States. People were free here until not very long ago so we even have written record from our side.
When white people came here there were hundreds of millions of native people. We called them savages of course. One thing that happened, through the years, was that various white people, for one reason or another, would end up living with native tribes—maybe they were adopted as a baby, maybe they were captured, maybe they walked out to the ‘wilderness’ and met people and started living with them. Curiously, if they happened to get ‘rescued’ by the white civilization, almost always, as soon as they could, they escaped back to their tribe.
That’s a pretty big clue. Maybe the way those savages were living was way better than the way we were living.
Another interesting clue comes from actually paying attention to native wisdom (instead of stealing it). The stories that we find have a common theme. They tell us that human beings have a natural way to be but that it takes work to stay awake that way. Darkness can easily fall across our eyes so we must practice ceremonies for staying sane. Stories, ceremonies and songs are tricks and tips to stay in this natural balanced state.
Native wisdom knows that we tend to fall out of harmony and that we’re always better off when we come back.
I recommend reading this book: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. It’s a little long, it’s a little involved, but it just tells an intricate new story about the history of humanity from our white conquering point of view. This gives us a possibility of coming back there.
If we can take these ideas and start working it into Nonduality teachings it will create a new vision and purpose for seeking enlightenment. You’ll start realizing that what you are seeking is much like that person who ended up back in civilization and then said, “No, I don’t want to do this. I’m going back to the natural.” They turn around and walk back home. You can turn around and walk back home.
It’s not like you are progressing forward into a fabulous enlightenment. What you’re looking for is this absolutely natural state of the human being. The only question is how to drop the conditioned addiction to division. It’s not a quest. It’s simply noticing that the conditioned response sees things as divided.
Can you drop that?
Nonduality and enlightenment traditions say, “Yes. You can drop that in an instant by a willingness to come to a place of zero.” Awakening happens the second you see who you are as “not” the things you are seeing, but as the seeing itself.
Then from that place we can start working back into the traditional native teachings that show us how to be human beings with each other. Ultimately it’s not about you. It’s about everyone and everything else.