Question: There seems to be a loss of wisdom in our world. I’m only 31 but most of the time when I’m with those closest to me, I feel like I’m an elder to my elders. I can’t believe how narrow-minded they are and some of the things that come out of their mouths about politics are just insanity. I usually just try to make light of it and say something like, “The 12th century called. They want their world-view back.” So, I try to laugh it off – but I’m not laughing on the inside. To tie my question to the video, they are completely lost and, yet, they’re supposed to be the wise ones with all of the life experience. What is going on?
Michael Richardson-Borne: Consciousness is going on – that is all.
Inquire into how these pseudo-elders are your own literal reflection. Inquire into how othering their narrow-mindedness just keeps you insane and in perfect lock-step with the same symptom of their insanity. How is looking outside of yourself and comparing your story to what you perceive as the insane stories of your contemporaries just a kind of meticulous unconscious war on yourself? How is the concern with their “lostness” a pointer to your own state of being lost?
Take a look at what the lost activity of your mind’s attachments is re-enforcing. Take a look at how belief in a separate self and insanity correspond. How is your own pride keeping you from hearing the chant of the totality that lives all the hearts of humanity, old and young – embracing every breath of confusion as its own? What is keeping you from remembering there is only one way to become an elder, and that’s to move beyond time into the lived experience of Non-separation? When you recognize it is not you talking with them or them to you – rather there is just a talking and an impersonal observation of this talking, you will also recognize that these same people are the origin of objects like flowers and leaves and everything else that is holy and unholy held together by an infrastructure of undefined space. Take your worry about an insanity that you consider outside of yourself and realize how it rests in and as the undefined.
That said, you are recognizing fragments of the culture of separation – but unknowingly from another perspective of the separate. Granted, this is a start – at least you’re questioning. Now, turn that questioning in on itself, make room for the mind to pierce the mind. Navigate the essence of the stories you hold about the people around you. Locate the structure that gives you something in which to compare these stories. Locate what you imagine is a concrete figure for this comparison. What is this statue? What is this stake in the ground? What is the ground that supplies a base for this stake? Is the solidity of any or all of this questionable?
The answer, of course, is yes – which is the beginning of the Path of Non-separation. Not knowing the ground I speak of is the reason you are lost and not laughing on the inside. You don’t yet hear the joke. From Non-separation, there is always a laughing inside of the pain that is felt, a laughing that lives the pain of separation.
Also, remember the world-view that you are recognizing as having more depth than what you called the 12th century perspective of your acquaintances will also be considered a 12th-century point of view eventually. Stories always replace stories in the culture of separation and this culture believes this to be change. The culture of separation will translate itself and consider this the depth of the real. Stories only recognize stories – stories can’t recognize the source of their existence. One must let go of story before this source can come into view and pervade all identification.
To be pervaded by what you are already pervaded by, one has to only get to the source of all world-views. Get to the foundation of being that holds all world-views as a collection of stories being lived in the moment, nothing more. Get to the illusion that makes it possible for a continuous history to be written from multiple perspectives. See that these allegiances of the separate self are unreal. World-views are a flavored expression of consciousness that always taste the same on a tongue that consciously feeds as consciousness. No matter what Non-separation ingests, an indescribably neutral flavor is underlying the sweet, the salty, the bitter, and the aromatic. Getting lost in the particular tastes of the world, without noticing the singular taste of what is doing the tasting, is how the world-view of a separate self remains intact.
Q: If what I’m thinking is just another world-view, an expression of being lost in separation, I can’t help but feel like I’m missing something. Can you please clarify what you mean when you say “lost?”
MR-B: “Lost” is the sole identification with a separate self. Lost is a life lived solely as a thinking individual that has forgotten the awareness that includes thinking. Lost is being lived as that which is not lost, but warped by the lost as an action of the unlost.
It’s realigning the unlost with the unlost that is the unwinding of the separate self and will be the unwinding of the culture of separation.
Humanity’s tendencies are a repeating pattern of lostness drawn in the sand of the unlost. This lostness has carved unseen mountains that grow from the ground and point to the sky as a single movement. But the separate self either can’t see the beach or is busy scaling the intricacies of the mountains not recognizing that the beach is just over the horizon or that the mountains are a metaphor. All of this happens because the wisdom of Non-separation has been unconsciously rejected.
Q: If this pattern continues on long enough, can the wisdom you speak of be entirely lost?
MR-B: Interesting question. Let me answer this in two ways.
If you’re asking if consciousness itself can be lost, then no. As I stated before, it can be forgotten, but that which we are cannot be entirely lost. What is the essence of all cannot be lost – it’s neither an object that can be misplaced nor an item that has an independent existence that can be possessed, moved, or left in a specific location.
If you’re asking if the truth of our pre-existing unity can be forgotten forever, then yes. In fact, I’d say if humanity doesn’t collectively wake up sooner rather than later, this is exactly where we are heading.
The separate self is so ingrained in our culture that any mention of our pre-existing unity is automatically treated with suspicion at best, but more typically, with a strong disdain. It’s as if an invitation to remember the truth of our unified being, to turn within and question the separate self, is the equivalent of inviting one to join a terrorist group or a cult. With this kind of apprehension embedded in the culture of separation, the recognition of Non-separation is a tough one – and only getting tougher as humanity entrenches further into the separate self, and in more complex, sophisticated ways.
Q: Can individuals who understand Non-separation be lost in this world? Danny Brown’s video that we just watched showed the pain of the lost supplying the lost with what they need to cope with the pain of being lost. Money, drugs, sex – it’s all there. How do you avoid getting lost inside of the world of the lost?
MR-B: When Non-separation is understood, there are no individuals left, including what was formerly perceived as a personal self. When there are no individuals, the thought of, or concern with, being lost evaporates. Without division, there is nowhere to go and one is empowered to rest as the undivided. It’s left to consciousness to work out the details around money, drugs, and sex rather than being left to false individuals in a culture that approves of and listens to “established experts” on such matters – which are just personal opinions from individuals who are still unaware of their origin.
In the culture of Non-separation, being lived as the origin may actually keep the habits of acquiring money, drugs, and sex – but the whole understands that consciousness is living this into being rather than projecting blame on a self-authoring individual isolated from the whole. This kind of understanding changes the rehabilitation process from shame, blame, and punishment for actions of self-authorship to compassionately investigating the stories of this reflection of consciousness and how to best go about inviting a re-connection with one’s true being that re-situates the pain of the mind into a larger container.
So, even though the men and women in this video can be considered lost, those who consider them lost are also lost if they don’t understand that everything lived into being couldn’t have happened any other way. All that can be done is to live as an invitation to the self to remember the self, an invitation for lost reflections to re-align with their true being. Being lived as this impersonal invitation is being lived as the found. As the found, there is nothing to avoid, nothing to get lost in – all is a current revealing the self to the self and one is always home.
Q: As we talk, if what you say is true, I see that although I thought I knew a lot, I’m lost too. If I understand what you’re suggesting correctly, I’m part of a situation where the lost is leading the lost. How can anyone help anyone if this is the case?
MR-B: That is exactly the point of what I previously said. They can’t. True help is rarely available, and when it is, people don’t recognize it. What the culture of separation thinks of as help is either purely physical or a form of internal support that aides in managing an illusion of a separate self. Trying to get a person’s story to be accepted as real in a way that keeps them from experiencing as many painful emotions as possible, or trying to convince a person that perception is reality, or assuming a position that affirms the belief in an individual’s control over the “world process,” is considered the best way, if not the only way, to offer help.
Throughout this conversation, I can tell you already perceive that the culture of separation is a dead end. I am here to remind you that the culture of Non-separation has no end. Solve your own lostness and you will live as the found. The found has no need for the distractions of the culture of separation, has no need for the distractions of the separate self. But remember, in the culture of separation, attachment to distractions is an encouraged form of forgetfulness that keeps you lost.