Let’s do a recap of what we’ve been learning in this series on the intersection between native wisdom and nonduality, so we can put it all together and start moving on to some action steps.
To what exactly? How does nonduality help us enter this native wisdom State? How do we change one worldview for the other? Can it be done efficiently and easily? What I’m saying is yes, yes it can. If we really, really look at where our worldview came from, it makes it a lot easier to switch it to the natural state where we want to reside, naturally reside. This place where we don’t have the crust of civilization on top of us.
We started talking about how these two things intersect. Then we took nonduality teachings and, instead of having the idea of getting rid of our thoughts, we realized that thoughts are formed from language. Language is easier to see. Thoughts are nothing more than language going through our heads in a repeat loop. It’s a natural, normal thing to do; that is how our brains are formed, that’s what makes us be human beings.
Language is a natural thing for us to learn and to invent. Language evolves. Language has limits, huge limits, particularly our modern languages that divide everything into pieces. ‘There’s an apple over there, there’s a guitar over there.’ We have the habit of seeing the division of things more than we see the way they are interconnected, simply because that is the way our language structure is formed.
It’s easy to get out of that. It’s way easier to deal with your mind if you realize that’s just language.
We see this when we meditate. You know how when you meditate your thoughts just go and go? We’re told we have to get rid of our thoughts but if you try it, it’s just madness.
We get caught in a loop, ‘I’ve got to get rid of my thoughts.’ Oh dang! That was a thought…and the thought about a thought is a thought! You can’t get rid of your thoughts they are literally part of your biology.
If instead you realize that this apparent sound in your head is just language it’s easy to see that it’s not you. “That’s not me!” Relax and the language loop can simply go, go, go, go, go along by itself and do whatever it wants to do. Often it’s useful. Maybe you’ll sit there meditating and figure something out.
It can be very useful to your life. It’s only language. That’s what’s firing through your head.
Next we talked about history and the way we tell our history stories. We saw how these stories have turned us into a very isolated vision of ourselves. Our history comes from the fact that we’ve become broken. We’re not living in a native worldview anymore, and so we’re confused. Because we’re confused, we’re easily controlled. And because we’re easily controlled, we fall into hierarchy. We want someone to save us, we feel safer if someone else is in charge. Especially if they’re telling us ‘follow me and you’ll be safe.’
We fall into these hierarchies because of our inner confusion. We become weak and able to be controlled. Our whole history is the story of people who are following this hierarchy to our destruction. It’s not making us safer.
We can rewrite our history. It’s so easy to do. All we have to do is just put ourselves on the actual timeline that happened. History did not start with the written word. Like what year was that? Maybe 2,000 BC for scattered stone tablets. But really it was more like with the Romans. History certainly did not start at the year zero, right? We know that people were around before that. We know that the written word is just a sliver, the tiniest sliver of human history. Human beings have been our fully evolved selves for 60,000 years. Before that, we were almost us. Anthropologists are saying a million years of ‘just about there.’ We’ve been ‘almost us’ for 200,000 years. A huge long time. Generations, generations of people.
Our stories tell us that, these brute savages were living terrible, miserable lives. No, they weren’t. They were living fabulous, wonderful lives. It simply doesn’t make sense that we were miserable. Watch a little squirrel running through the forest. Does it look miserable? No, it’s a little squirrel, it’s running around. And deer, and elephants, and monkeys! They aren’t miserable. Back when we were pre-humans, we weren’t miserable, we were doing great. And all the hundreds of thousands of years that we’ve been us… we were doing great.
Next, here in our inquiry, we brought in babies. In order for us to be what we are, babies had to always be able to thrive. How did the human baby survive all those thousands and thousands of years before we had strollers and pacifiers? Hopefully through this retelling of the tale of who we are we started realizing that the story of us is full and ripe. Native wisdom is telling us that this is definitely how this was. We still have to stories coming to us from the native communities alive today.
When we look at the broad picture it only makes sense that what evolved first was the human community. The evolved nest, the bubble. In order for brains to grow bigger we had to nourish, support and take care of the mother. And we had to take care of the babies. The human brain would not have been able to get bigger unless all the babies were taken care of. There had to be a full system to cradle the babies as they were being born more and more premature.
Our evolution timeline is pretty clear. We went from having small babies that could take care of itself pretty quickly to infants that require care for years. It evolved slowly. Maybe first a few more days, then a few weeks. But if you add on a couple more months of care to keep a baby alive, you’ve added a huge complication that could only be solved by lots of people taking care of this baby.
How did those savage brutes take care of those babies… unless maybe they weren’t such savage brutes? A million years ago heads were already bigger. Babies were being born, what, six months early, a year? Human babies are dependent for years.
This retelling of the story gives us a real sense of human beings’ ability to care for each other. We can get a picture of this natural bubble of care that all of us grow in, live in. Clearly the baby isn’t the entire picture. We start realizing that every growing child, every adult is a full part of the picture of the human bubble. The natural course is to grow from the center of the bubble to becoming the caretaker. This should bring the revelation you are not a baby anymore! Maybe you did not get raised in a totally nurturing situation. Well heck. You are now the fully grown adult and your point of thriving is to be giving into the bubble. You are now the one who is providing nurturing for this bubble of care. Caring is just as vital and satisfyingly as being cared for. This is the dynamic that easily and naturally exists between human beings. It is just as fulfilling to be the adult providing this care as it is to be the baby receiving the care.
This is who you are.
So now we’ve put ourselves into a place where our brains work perfectly fine and naturally. We have language that’s complicated to use, but it is what it is. Within the structure of this worldview, we can become a fully awake human. It’s helpful to get rid of this history-story of how horrible people are and start realizing that we are this amazingly integrated, conscious, awake person. This makes it easier for us to start dropping the crust of our false imagined existence and start becoming the fully ripe human being that we’re all meant to be.
So that’s a little bit of a recap. We’re going to start move into a couple of weeks of doing. We’re going to work on that annoying question: what do we actually do?
We’ll do this in two steps. First we’re going to talk about some of the traps, things to not do… because of course, this is nonduality. Not two. We always start talking about what’s not existing first. Then we’re going to go into six steps of how to reach the nondual state.