Nate Hagens

Maybe I keep failing to understand non-duality because I was raised in a way and grew up in a culture that makes it almost impossible to understand.

I'm sure you've heard the old line about a fish that doesn't know what water is.

The fish has never been dry, so wetness isn't a thing that it can point to.

It's just the medium.

To a fish, it's both everywhere and nowhere at once.

And I suspect a lot of us in the West are like that fish.

We're swimming in the very thing that makes non-duality invisible to us.

And we can't see it because we've never once stepped out of it.

Let's start with our language.

Listen to how I build a simple sentence.

I see the tree.

Three things just like that in our words.

A watcher, an act of watching, and a thing being watched.

We can barely open our mouths without sorting our world into a someone and a something and other things.

various buckets.

Our grammar is actually a little machine that generates separation.

And then we reach for that same machine to try to understand a thing that has no cracks or seams in it at all for us to scrutinize and unpack.

So we pick up the tool that builds the wall and

We ask it, show us a place with no walls.

And of course, it goes deeper than grammar.