On Nonduality, Politics, and Freedom

By Caitlin Johnstone – Mar 15, 2021

We are all one.

A lucid perception of reality reveals that our entire experience of what we call the world is inseparable from the awareness in which it appears, and that this awareness is boundless, timeless, and head-over-heels in love with all that is. There is no possible experience of the universe which is not painted upon the canvass of infinite loving awareness, with paint that is made of that same awareness, by a painter who is that same awareness.

Separation is an illusion. There are no true separate and isolated objects. We behold an ineffable unfolding of processes in the appearance of time using sense organs and brains which perceive and understand only a very tiny slice of what’s going on around us, and then our woefully inadequate primate minds pin labels on different aspects of this experience.

We engage in a cute game of make believe where we pretend that our labels are real, and that this label over here is a thing that is completely separate and separable from that other labeled thing over there. Really it’s just a bunch of “HI, MY NAME IS” stickers swirling around in a pool of water, each part inseparable from the rest.

We take this body and label it “me”, and we hold this “me” as separate from the other aspects of the oneness to which we have affixed other labels. This gives a sense of control and safety to an organism which came into this world helpless and squishy-headed. We get it into our heads from a very early age that we can use thoughts to protect and secure the interests of this “me” character we invented against the scary “world” and “others” which we have also labeled in our minds, and from then on our life is dominated by incessant compulsive mental narrative about the “me” and how it relates to all the other phenomena we have made labels for.

From this point onward, mental narrative lives in the foreground of our experience, with our actual experience of life as it is taking on a much more background role. We’re far less likely to really take in our surroundings and truly experience our senses in a given moment than we are to keep our interest and attention on our own mental chatter, and we’re even less likely to turn our attention to the field of awareness in which all this is happening.

From there our true nature is forgotten. The deep love and contentment at the heart of our being is lost to us, so we spend our days flailing around in confusion trying to find it again. We try to find the innate joy we sense we’re supposed to experience in socialization. In the approval of others. In substance abuse. In sex. In entertainment. In achievement. In the accumulation of wealth and material goods. In religion and spirituality. And above all, in compulsive mental chatter.

And then it’s just a question of who can play the illusion the best to amass the most resources and security for their imaginary “me” character. The best players are the ones who understand how to manipulate the mental narratives which dominate everyone’s life at mass scale to convince them to give their money to specific companies, to support specific agendas, and to consent to specific power structures. The more minds you can manipulate at a given time, the more control you have over the game and its outcomes.

This is why our world is a mess today. We can zoom the camera in and pretend it’s about electoral politics, we can zoom out a bit further and pretend it’s about plutocracy and propaganda, but really, if we can summon up enough lucidity to see what’s really going on here, it’s about a species of primate quickly evolving the capacity for abstract thought and getting confused about its true nature in the process.

The good news is that we can always wake up. We can always realize we’ve been playing a video game this entire time, set down the remote controller, and step outside. All we need to do is take our attention away from the delusional mental chatter in our heads and turn it toward the awareness in which it occurs. By getting sincerely curious about the nature and source of our own field of consciousness and investigating it in our own experience, we can remember what we really are underneath the play of forms.

Nothing needs to be taken on faith in order for this investigation to occur. Just get really curious about how your own field of consciousness is actually happening, and about the answer to the question “What am I?”

What is perceiving this field of consciousness? Are there any boundaries in it? Is there any “me” in any of the appearances arising here? Are there any real discernible lines of separation between the field of consciousness and that which perceives it? Find out for yourself, if you are interested in finding out.

We can talk about politics and revolution, we can talk about fighting the propaganda machine and taking down the oligarchic empire, but if we’re being really honest with ourselves what we’re really going to have to do is wake up. Together, as a species. Wake up beyond this adolescent transitional phase between living as unthinking animals and living as a species which has a mature relationship with its capacity for abstract thought. Where thought is a useful tool we can pick up as needed and set down when we’re done instead of being the director, star and screenwriter of the entire show.

Only when we awaken to what we really are and see through the veil of separation will we have the ability to collectively begin moving toward a healthy world, where we collaborate with each other and our ecosystem instead of competing, killing and exploiting under the delusion that we are separate.

We have always had the ability to awaken in this way; only difference is the ecocidal, omnicidal nature of the game we’ve been playing means we don’t have the option of playing anymore. This is humanity’s evolve-or-die time. We’re about to find out if we’re the kind of species which unlocks a latent adaptation to its changing situation and goes on to survive and thrive, or the kind which goes extinct.

Either way, we will be immensely, deeply loved the entire time. Every molecule of our being, for however long it lasts.

Featured image: File Photo.

(Caitlin Johnstone.com)