Unity will include other people

Unity will include other people. You won’t be there just all by yourself. Often we don’t think about that. Sometimes we might imagine that living in a consciousness of complete unity will be with some cosmic force. But it's going to include people! Most of them will be regular old crazy people, just like we have all around us now.

Can that change? Imagine, what would it be like if you were born into an enlightened world?

Tip: you actually were. There is nothing wrong with existence itself, there is nothing wrong with creation itself, there’s nothing wrong with the world itself. In fact, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with human beings. It’s just that there’s really a lot of human beings who like to imagine that there is something very, very wrong. But if you see yourself as being in this already awake, enlightened world, that will help dissolve the veil of separation that you believe you live under and come into the reality of yourself.

Many of us are drawn to non-duality and spiritual teachings because we have really good imaginations. Sometimes we allow that to really pull us off track, but we can also use it to start really putting ourselves in a different world and feel what that’s like. So, imagine if you had been born in a bubble of community that was completely functional. Where, as a small child, every single need was taken care of. And as you grew older, you became the person who was giving this care then to the children around you, to the community around you, and to each other. So, in your meditations, just kind of imagine this place, and you’ll find it to be very healing and allow you to see yourself.

– We can’t undo our history –

We can’t undo our personal history, but we can undo some of the stories that it has given us. One of the good ways to do that is to go and read different stories. So, go to my website, Mprimer.com, and you’ll find a list of books on Native wisdom. You’ll start seeing a totally different story of who human beings are through this reading. So, dive as deep into that as you can. This will then help you more easily find out who you are because it will undo some of the crust that has gathered in front of your eyes. You are the one experiencing your own life.
 

Nondual teachings are about unity. We often change it, though, into this um, unity with a kind of like a nebulous universe floating around and kind of not a real thing. What if instead we really saw unity as with what exists, particularly with each other, with human beings? If we’re looking for unity, the very first thing to be unified with would be right where we are, with the people that we are with. And the best way to have unity, to experience it, is to be involved in caring for other people as much as possible. This will help you find yourself.

– Nonduality and healing –

Many of us in today’s world are broken and in pain, and even if we aren’t, like at this very moment, we’re living in a very broken society with a really a lot of pain around us. So how does nonduality and healing relate to each other? A lot of us come into spiritual teachings looking for healing. One of the best ways we can do it is to use these particular teachings of how to come into unity with all of the universe and all of existence. Use it as a tool for right here and now. Don’t put enlightenment off as something in the future. Start actually living in as much unity as you can.
 

One thing that is very ironic about non-duality teachings is that it tends to make us forget about everybody else, all the other humans. It puts us on this individual search for enlightenment, and that is just crazy because human beings are one. We know in theory that we're looking for unity with everything. The very first unity that should exist, and happen, and be acknowledged, is our unity with other human beings. One way we can do that is by looking deeper into native spirituality. In natural societies, people were raised in a bubble of community with each other from the day you're a baby until you're the one taking care of the babies.

- Non Dual Adults -

Another thing that's ironic about most non-duality teachings is that we're not treated as adults. We're talking about this unity of everything, but we don't look at the unity of human beings. Just think about it. If you were actually being treated as an adult, you would be expected to care for other people, particularly for babies and children and other people younger than you. It would be a given that that's what adults do – they offer care. They come out of pure selfishness into a place where they're giving and caring and taking care of other people. This is completely missing in most nondual teachings. So let's add it back in: caring.
 

We spent two weeks talking about language and history and how that creates our perception of who we are. The idea of who we are has been given to us by our society since birth. It's been given to us in the language of our birth and it's been given to us through the constant stories that we hear. The stories that give us our ideas about who we are as human beings and who we are as an individual... even the idea that we are an individual is something that has been told to us. It's not necessarily our true nature. 

- Short Circuiting the Dysfunction -

The reason I'm doing the series on nonduality and Native history is because I want to short-circuit the dysfunction that our language and our history has given us. One of the easiest ways to do that is to point out other cultures where this dysfunction has not created the society. Most important is to emphasize the fact that human beings lived without this dysfunction for a really long time. Why it fits in with nonduality is that understanding more about who we are as human beings should help us stop and go to that place of enlightenment that we're looking for, especially when we understand that this is our natural human state.