Nate Hagens

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.

Everything around us in this culture is organized around the idea that we are each separate someone's.

Your name and your resume and your achievements and your stuff in your garage and your credit store and your eventual death.

From a time we're small, we are trained to become a self, a bounded little person standing slightly apart from everything else, looking out at the world and putting things into categories.

And then non-duality comes along and whispers that this might have it backwards, or as my dad would say, bass-ackwards.

That the self could be less of a thing watching from behind your eyes and more of a motion, something the whole universe is briefly simultaneously doing in the shape of you.

So this morning it dawned on me that asking for a definition of non-duality was actually the wrong move from the very beginning, because to define something is to draw a line around it, this and not that, inside that fence or outside that fence.

And we need that skill for energy, for biophysical economics and finance,

but the thing the wisdom traditions have been pointing at is the one thing that has no outside.

There's nowhere to stand that isn't already part of it.