Life is happening; it’s a verb. The verb is the reality and the noun is the illusion. You are looking at it from the point of view of being a noun so you’re missing it. -Paul Hedderman
The lack of separation in reality is not a new observation. It’s ancient knowledge. It’s got names like Shiva. Oneness. The Great Mother. Nonduality. Ultimate Reality. True Nature. Ubuntu. God. The Tao. The ‘I Am.’ Every mystic tradition of every religion talks of this Oneness.
It is built into the stories of our indigenous ancestors, the world over. There is a Navajo saying, “If you kill the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for rain,” pointing out the invisible link between prairie dogs tunnels and weather/soil health. Truly, there are endless parables and lessons along these lines, as it is an essential truth. Check out a couple videos of African folk tales on the subject here.
But somehow, somewhere, the vast majority of humans on Earth hooked into a paradigm of separation. Of us and the world, us & God.
Instead of seeing differentiation in life, we saw division.
I can’t imagine in the history of all things, a more colossal mistake.
So strange, when you think of it. It’s plainly obvious that the trees and plants are not separate from the air, the soil, or the water, and that our bodies are made of the same water and chemistry and energy. Within our bodies, our liver connects with the heart, the kidney, the skin, the endocrine system and… well, everything. In every ecosystem there are boundaries, but not divisions. There are gates and channels, but they are permeable. There are bubbles, but they always burst. Nothing is every truly separate or divided.
Somehow we stopped seeing this total interconnectedness of things. We forget we are made of the same stuff as the stars and the ocean. That we are Nature too. As several ecologists and environmentalists have noted, we’ve literally written ourselves out of the definition of nature.
The colossal mistake of division reverberates in absolutely everything—how we govern ourselves & create community. How we farm and consume. How we interact with people from different backgrounds. It’s in how we shop and have sex and cook and play and work and educate and heal ourselves.
In medicine, it’s the germ theory versus terrain theory. As many doctors and scientists agree, the wrong ‘theory’ won. It should have been Be’champ vs Pasteur (though there is room for both), because he had a wider view of health, and therefore the interventions are more intelligent and effective—there is a taking into account the whole, the full terrain of the body, and of the larger environments/bodies a person exists in. With germ theory we make war, generally. Attack this cell. Fight this disease. That separate thing over there that is hurting this separate thing over here.
But there isn’t a separate person and there aren’t separate body parts. People are not nouns. And their organs and cells and bacteria are not smaller nouns within that noun.
So we end up making war on ourselves. ‘We have met the enemy..and it is us,’ as Pogo famously said.
In actual fact there is an ongoing flow of One energy and biology. It’s all God, all Life—living itself. There are not separate doers. No individual beings, driving the different bodies.
No doer over here writing this, and no doer over there, reading.
Just try to inflict a noun, a separate self, onto this moment—try to be hungry before you actually are, or like that person whom you have visceral distaste for. Try to digest your food. Grow your hair and nails. Or not think that thought. Give it a go, separate self!
Of course, we try this all the time. We insert a noun into everything. Even my last two sentences imply a noun. (It’s right there in our language, every time).
But where would that noun, that separate self be? Inside your head? Where, exactly? The prefrontal cortex? (the big contender in the world of neurobiology) Ok… how? How is it located there, exactly? And if it’s there inside your brain somewhere, is that spot not connected with the rest of your brain, body, and environment?
We get nowhere, attempting to find the noun, the cut-off.
Because there isn’t one. What there is is verb-ing.
So that’s where we can go with our awareness. To the verbing. The Tao. The flow.
But it’s not the flow you’ve probably heard of. If we web search the word ‘flow’ it is all about ‘getting into flow,’ hacking it, etc. The psychologist Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi defines flow as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” This is about as close as we got in psychology. However, the definition still implies a noun and a ‘state’ that noun is in, which comes and goes.
This is really the problem with all of psychology. Psychology implies a self, versus realizing the Self. The whole focus is on the nonexistent noun.
It’s a real problem in helping someone live a sane and enjoyable life!
As other nondual teachers have phrased it, we have a massive case of mistaken identity. Really, you are already the flow itself—-already being the key word. You don’t have to get into a different ‘state.’ You don’t have to get anywhere. Your real identity is this whole, moving moment. This Oneness. This verbing.
And this verbing is available to be heard. It’s a feeling inside you. We can feel it like the surfer feels the wave, or like the artist feels the next color in the landscape.
It’s what would happen if your hallucinated noun was out of the picture.
So, what does your body feel like right now? What feels like floating-down-the-river (not to your identity, your role, your ethics, your ‘shoulds’—i.e. your noun), but to your whole Being, to the whole moment?
Look from the point of view of awareness, with the whole body, the whole moment included. In other words, look from the perspective of the verbing.
What is it saying? How is it moving? Can you let this river of life carry you?