Everything that I say is imagination because it’s coming out with words. Words are simply a sound that describes a thing. It’s not actually the thing.
But I’m going to tell a story anyway.
We are all nuts. In our current society we’re all nuts. I mean… look how we’re raised. We’re confused. We’re broken. We feel like we don’t belong. We all feel alone. That’s not the natural human state.
It’s good to know, at least as a theory, that this is not the natural human state. The goal of spirituality, the goal of non-duality, is to get us back to this natural state.
Think about the time of Buddha, Siddhartha. He was raised a fabulous Prince. Everything was wonderful for him and then he accidentally saw how all the other people were living, how all the poor people were living, and that it was horrible. It broke his brain because in that flash of a second he was able to see that everything he’d been taught since he was young was a lie. And it was such a lie that there was no way out of it. It was a full circle of lies that that he couldn’t figure out how to pop free of. So he went on a spiritual search. At his time, to go on a spiritual search you would have to rely on other people that are on a spiritual search. So he went out and started doing the thing of the day which was austerity and starving himself and living in the forest with other seekers, almost to the point where he killed himself.
Then one day he broke through that circle of lies. The only way you can do it is to break completely through. Drop the whole thing and be in a complete state of not knowing: nothingness.
There’s not a a word to describe it. The best we have is Hari Om Tat Sat. The truth.
So. He wakes up and he’s like, “Wow! Dude! He goes running back to all the guys that had starved themselves in the forest with him. “Let me tell you about this! Let me tell you about this!” And he spent the whole rest of his life trying to tell the people in his society about how to get to this state.
That’s one story. Let me tell a different story now.
The story of of Siddhartha, of Buddha, is fairly well known… and I just gave a not really good description of it. This second story is about something that I know very vaguely but that I imagine could be the truth.
Let’s imagine a more native society, before what we call civilization. And note: we’re talking brilliant people. We’ve been taught to think of savages as stupid and uneducated. But they weren’t. They were brilliant, and well thought, and deep, and knowledgeable, and very in touch with what can go wrong with a human beings. They were masters of what to do about it.
So in my imaginary society the elders were wise, because they had stepped out of their own possibilities of insanity. Every young person that would be born would go through their lives having moments of unclarity, because that’s normal. Each young person would have a tendency to cling to the false self that feels that it’s important, that it’s separate, and that things are about “Me. Me. Me.”
We have this now, of course. That’s the state of young human beings, isn’t it? In today’s world it’s the state of pretty much all the adults as well. But we’re in my imaginary society right so it’s only the youth with this separateness.
Coming out of it is the purpose of the Vision Quest. The young person gets to a point where they are capable of seeing their own confusion and they get sent off on a Vision Quest.
This young person does something dramatic, like starving, out by themselves in the forest. Until finally the spirit animals start talking to them, and they reach that state that Buddha had gone to.
But they hadn’t been lied to as much when they were young, so as they come into this state of wholeness everything just makes sense. The stories and their place in it makes sense. They go back to their tribe and all the fully self knowing adults welcome them home. It’s like, “Welcome to being an adult human being. Welcome to being a participant of our society.” They’re welcomed home.
Totally different than Buddha’s experience where he woke up and there was nobody else to share this with him. He had to start a group of people on his own, and did a really good job of creating a society that worked for a while. But it was working against the momentum of all the insane people who were still swirling in the lies.
But let’s go back again to my imaginary society where this is what it meant to be a fully involved adult human being. To be awake, normal, relaxed in who they are. Participants with all the people, plants, animals, and elements.
So, maybe we should think of our spiritual search as adulting. Not finding something special, but simply becoming full adults. Coming out of the selfishness of childhood into that place where we can work and belong. Were we can be part of, and contribute to, what’s around us. Where we’re responsible. Not responsible as a chore, but responsible as something that you take on willingly with your strength of being and knowing.