Nate Hagens

it starts looking like the missing piece.

The thing pointing straight at the root of how we came to treat everything we depend on as though it was on a balance sheet and it were not us.

As we keep looking for fixes out there in our policies and in technology and in guidance from AI and better numbers to analyze a thing,

But maybe, dare I say probably, some of the real work is in here, in our own quiet dismantling of that wall that allowed us en masse, eight billion strong, though not all of eight billion, there are indigenous people that have understood this all along, allowed us en masse to treat a living world like a dead one in the first place.

So sitting here today, I still cannot define non-duality for you.

I've had many chances and have seemingly failed.

But I'm starting to suspect that my hunger and my drive to nail down the definition, to get that clean sentence or paragraph and to file it away as something I understand

is perhaps the most Western thing about me.

The grasping itself is the wall.

So I will leave it where it actually sits for me today, which is unfinished.

Maybe the gift here was never going to be that I finally understand non-duality.

Maybe it's a smaller and more honest and a bit more potent than that.

It's just that my grip has loosened a little.

And the certainty that I'm in here and everything else is out there gets a hairline crack in it.

And then a bit more light gets through than it did yesterday.

I have not learned it, the term or the practice.

But I have definitely learned to stop being so sure that I'm separate.

Talk to you next week.

Have a good weekend.

You're listening to The Great Simplification.