Nate Hagens

They're all thoughtful people.

Some of them have spent decades inside that paradigm.

And it dawned on me this morning, on a bike ride, which is usually where I get these realizations, that every time I ask for that definition, I listen closely, I nod, I feel like I'm right at the cusp of understanding it, and then it's gone.

And I walk away.

with with my hands empty, which is, I guess why I've repeated the question at least seven times to guests and others.

I've assumed that the problem was me.

I'm not still enough.

I have too many ADHD tendencies.

I'm not advanced enough on my journey.

I'm too impatient and the like.

But this morning, a different thought crept in.

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.