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  Imagine that scientifically advanced aliens exist and are looking at the earth through powerful telescopes right “now.” What do they see? The answer to that question depends entirely on how far away they are. So imagine that right now, there is an alien named Marge in a star system a million light-years away who’s looking through her advanced alien telescope at Earth, watching you read this book. There’s no need to be too creeped out at that idea though, because from your perspective, Marge will not see you reading this until a million years from now. That is how long it will take for the light reflecting off of you and this book to make it all the way to her telescope a million light-years away.

  Now, let’s say that you somehow happen to have gotten your hands on one of these really advanced alien telescopes as well. And let’s say that you have also magically acquired the knowledge that Marge is currently watching you and know exactly where she’s watching you from. Naturally, you’re compelled to turn your own amazing telescope towards the sky and look back at peeping Marge’s planet. What do you see? Well, even though Marge is “currently” looking at you from her home planet, what you see when looking back is not Marge, her telescope, or her current planet. What you see through your telescope is Marge’s planet a million years ago. She can see you through her telescope, but as you look back, you can’t see anything within a million years of her watching you. Weird, right?

  Okay, so now let’s say that you get frustrated that you can’t see Marge even though you know she’s there and looking at you and decide to pan your telescope around the night sky a bit to see what else you can find. Luckily, you find another inhabited planet, and alas, you stumble across an alien named Jorge who just so happens to be looking right back at Earth through his own powerful telescope. One might expect to feel startled to look up into the sky and see an alien staring back at you, but not you! Because you have already learned from your experience with Marge, that the telescope views aren’t going to be the same. Even though you can see Jorge staring right back at you with his telescope, you know he cannot see you. In fact, in a strange and convenient plot twist, Jorge just happens to be the right distance from Earth to be watching me writing this very chapter.

  So to recap, Marge, who is a million light-years away is “currently” (from her perspective) watching you reading this book. You can’t see her watching you from your perspective, but you can “currently” see Jorge, who is “currently” watching me write this book, which you will someday read in the future, which means that if he’s peeping at my screen like 12B over here, he knows you are watching him before you do. In this scenario, your reading of these words right now is not only happening in your present but also in the future (as seen through Jorge’s “now”) and the ancient past (as seen through Marge’s “now”). How’s your brain doing, dear reader?

  Here’s my point: When you look deeply enough into any one moment, it becomes clear that there is no such thing as an objective or universal “now.” This is easier for us to see over long distances like the ones in the above absurd scenario, but the truth and weirdness of special relativity applies even in face-to-face conversation. There is always some sort of lag of the “now” between you and every other observer you ever interact with who is inhabiting a different segment of space-time3 than you (which is everybody else). Your now is never my now. In fact, a single second of time, up in this airplane that I’m writing in, goes slightly faster than a single second of time down on the ground. Every moment we experience in this universe happens in a completely relative perspective.

  As physicist Carlo Rovelli put it, “Our intuitive idea of the present, the ensemble of all events happening ‘now’ in the universe, is an effect of our blindness: our inability to recognize small temporal intervals.”4 It is that blindness that gives us our sense of reality. It’s like how a fire dancer’s torch appears as a solid circle of flames as she spins it around her head. It’s not actually a circle, but our perception isn’t fast enough to keep up with the precise space-time coordinates of the moving light. In short, the reality that you and I are experiencing as you read, and I write, is a lot weirder than it might seem. What you may have thought of as your simple “now” moment of reading this book is really some weird amalgamation or relationship of countless different moments that include dead grandmothers, luxury spas, the US Postal Service, Japanese businessmen, and warm nuts.

  That period at the end of the first sentence of this chapter and, for that matter, everything in existence, is happening from and as a long, interconnected web of happenings, all of which are completely interdependent and inseparable from one another. Like an unfathomably complex game of sudoku, every numbered box in this universe belongs exactly as it is within its context. To change one number would be to change them all. You seeing the period in that first sentence is tied to me riding in this airplane, which is tied to my grandfather missing a boat in Turkey and taking a different one, which led him to meeting my grandmother, which is tied to the weather patterns that the boat encountered on its way to America, which is tied to the carbon emissions of the earth, which is tied to how many cows farted in the eighteenth century, which is tied to the size, timing, and precision of every asteroid that ever struck or missed the earth. John Donne wrote that no man is an island. No moment is an island either. All of it goes together.

  A common metaphor used in describing the nondual view is that of a wave in the ocean. In order to let that metaphor sink in, consider one more scenario:

  Imagine an ocean stretching out before you as far as you can see. The undulating surface of the water extends all the way to the horizon where it merges with the edge of the sky. Waves of turquoise blue crash onto the shore and crawl up to your toes with a slight sizzle of popping sea-foam. Looking out at this endless procession of wave upon wave, you notice one particularly appealing ocean curl rising higher than the rest. This wave is especially intriguing, so you summon the magical powers you didn’t know you had and scoop up the wave into a massive, clear glass container to bring back to your home with you. When you arrive, you set the wave container next to your front door—a bold, yet arguably misguided attempt at curb appeal.

  As you step back and look at it, you realize something is off. The wave doesn’t look at all like it did in the ocean. Before you magically ladled it from the endless stretch of sea into your display case, it was a mighty turquoise cascade crowned with a foamy white crest curling down into its trough. Now that it’s on your doorstep, it looks more like . . . a large jar of dirty water. This is because waves aren’t real and separate things from an ocean. Waves are the ocean waving. Waves are simply names we use to describe a type of pattern within the movement of the ocean, but there is no distance or separation between a wave and an ocean. Waves are oceans doing what oceans do, just as pears are what pear trees do, and human civilization is what the earth does.

  There is nothing in existence that is fundamentally separate from anything else. The full reality of one particular thing (say, a person) can never be found by simply adding up the separate constituency of its parts (heart, lungs, brain, fingernails . . . etc.), but it’s in the relationship between all of those parts and all the other patterns of energy in its environment (which happens to be everything in the universe). Thinking of a person as separate from her surroundings that she exists within (the universe) is as arbitrary as thinking of a flower petal as a separate thing from a flower. The petal implies a stem, which implies soil, which implies sunlight, which implies gravity, and so on and so on. In the same way, a living brain implies a body, which implies organic matter, which implies a planet a certain distance from a star, which also implies gravity, and so on. Human feet aren’t planted into the ground, so most of us don’t think about how fundamentally connected to the earth our bodies are, but our roots into the earth are the air we breathe and the food we eat and the water our bodies are made of. Human beings may be the wireless upgrade, but they are no less an extension and substance of the earth than a mountain is. You
are literally the earth. You are the universe doing what the universe does, just as light is what the sun does or a wave is what the ocean does. You could also see this in the opposite way—the universe is You doing what You do.

  This is not how it feels to most of us because the nerve endings in our bodies end at our skin. This gives the illusion of some sort of real boundary between the “inside” and “outside” of our bodies, but if you look closely enough, there is no such firm line. Our bodies are like a waterfall—although the specific water molecules in a single waterfall are never the same from one moment to the next, there is a similar enough pattern in how the body of water moves (due to our aforementioned blindness to small temporal intervals) for us to think of a waterfall as a consistent something. So we think of a waterfall as a noun rather than a verb. This is exactly how it is with our bodies. The dance between the constantly changing cells, the quantum-leaping electrons, the hundred-trillion neutrinos passing through us at any given moment, the ever-moving kinetic energy of the quarks, or binding energy of the gluons, finds enough of a musical pattern in our particular speed of perception for us to name a something. But what you think of as you (or anything else for that matter) is simply movement within the ocean of Being, of THIS. Rhythmic pattern within rhythmic pattern. Music within music.

  There is literally no end to this string of events that is the universe. You’ve likely heard of the “butterfly effect”? Well, the truth of the matter is not just that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings shapes weather patterns on Earth. The connection between events goes out much farther than that—to cosmological constants and electromagnetic fields and quantum gravity and everything and everyone that has ever been. The shape of your belly button is interdependent with the specific color, density, and shape of a rock on the third moon orbiting planet Z345 in a distant solar system of the Andromeda Galaxy. So, yes, a lot went into the period at the end of that first sentence.

  Still, what does any of this have to do with that not-okayness at the core of the human experience? What does seeing the interconnectedness of everything have to do with the amount of suffering or freedom that I experience? To get there, I’d like to tell you more of my story and why what I experienced in that spa paved the way for an entirely new way of seeing and experiencing the world. I used to feel separate, alone, and afraid. The universe was a big scary place “out there” that I needed to be protected from. I was afraid of death. God was my answer to that fear, but he too was “out there”—an omnipotent being who technically loved me but also watched me, and judged my every thought, attitude, and action. At the end of the day, at the bottom of my stories, I was alone. Hoping to be loved. To be saved. To be okay. But I wasn’t okay. For years, I suffered in the darkness of shame, doubt, and repression. I was a prisoner to my circumstances and the stories I experienced them through. I am not a prisoner anymore. I hope that by the end of this book, you will see that you don’t have to be either.

  It’s Not the Soap

  The first time I remember feeling that there was something fundamentally not okay with me was when I was five years old. I was having a playdate at a friend’s house (though we didn’t call them playdates back then). We were playing house in her bedroom while our parents talked about boring, adult stuff downstairs.

  Her name was Daisy. She asked me if I’d like to kiss her. I was afraid, but her asking made my body tingle in a way I had never felt before, and I had the strange and sudden urge to see what she looked like without her clothes on. I’d never seen a girl without her clothes on before and suddenly felt curious.

  This was before my world had taught me that my curiosity was evil, before I learned in my Christian school education that physicality and sexuality were part of the “fleshly” world that was not our real home.

  So, I asked Daisy if she’d like to take her clothes off. She said that she just wanted to kiss me, but even though I was only five, the genes in my body have had a lot of experience with that sort of thing through their millions of years of evolution, and they were prompting me to make a deal here. I offered Daisy a compromise—I’d be willing to kiss her if she took her clothes off. She agreed to take everything off but her underwear. The parents entered our burgeoning love chamber before anything else happened, and they were not happy with the scene they had discovered.

  After we got home, I remember sitting down with my father, feeling so embarrassed, so ashamed of myself. He was my hero. All I wanted was for him to be proud of me. He was the pastor of our church, and Daisy’s parents were elders. He didn’t need to say it explicitly, but I knew I had embarrassed him. Looking back, I’m sure he wasn’t as freaked out as I had thought he was. He probably knew we were just being normal, curious little kids, but at the time, I felt like I had done the worst thing anyone could ever do. I felt that something at the core of me was bad. My mind, my curiosity, my body, they were all evil and could not be trusted.

  I resolved to never do that sort of thing again. I wanted to prove to my dad and everyone else out there that I could be better than that. I could be a good and lovable boy. I told my dad that I was so sorry. I buried my head in his chest and wept.

  Fast forward a decade and I was the poster boy for evangelical Christianity in my little world in central Wisconsin. I was a straight-A student at my Christian school. I respected my elders, read the One Year Bible every day, and debated the godless evolutionists online. I didn’t dare drink, smoke, or cuss. I wore a purity ring that my dad gave me as a sign of my vow to not have sex until I was married.

  Here is a word-for-word segment of a journal entry from when I was sixteen:

  Lord God of Heaven, Creator of the universe, omnipotent, awesome Lord, I worship you. Help me God as I start to have my qt's [quiet times] again. Touch me. Give me the grace I need. I need a lot. Give me your grace for the remainder of this day, Lord. Teach me your wonderful ways, Lord. I will not walk in sin and condemnation. I will not listen to the lies of the evil one. I will worship. I will magnify and exalt the Lord my God and offer my life as a sacrifice, holy and pleasing to Him. Make me like your tool made of gold, Lord. I give you all the glory. To you be the majesty, glory, power, dominion, lordship, honor and praise. Thank you, God. Holy Spirit, help me, be my help. I trust you. In Jesus' mighty Name, Amen. Woo! Oh yeah, we went witnessing last week, and I got to minister to Ana. Bless her Lord. Convict her, touch her, reveal yourself.

  As you can see, I was all in. While other kids were out partying and having sex, I was at home journaling about “Lordship.” On weekends, I’d sometimes get together with my friends and have worship nights in our living rooms. I was a musician, but I only wrote songs to God. I didn’t even listen to secular music because I didn’t want to pollute my spirit.

  I didn’t date anyone until I was a senior in high school. She was a fellow preacher’s kid and a fellow worship leader. We used to sing Hillsong worship duets together, and that was sort of like our version of first base. We dated (or courted, thank you very much) for six months, but we never kissed. (I wasn’t about to relive the Daisy fiasco!) I didn’t even say the word butt when I was with her because I wanted to be a godly young gentleman. It was not a butt. It was a rear end, thank you very much.

  #lordship.

  I did go out on a limb and kiss her hand once, but we were warned by her parents that we were moving too fast. (You know how it goes. Step one: worship duets. Step two: hand kissing. Step three: anal beads.)

  She and I were voted homecoming king and queen because of our laudable display of godliness, and I won the coveted “King David” award at my Christian high school. I spent many of my lunch breaks fasting and praying and trying to overcome any hand-kissing or masturbatory inclinations or desires. (I was a good boy, right Dad?)

  I needed to be good. I needed God to fix me so I could be okay.

  I’d like to offer you some context now for that lordship journal entry that I shared with you earlier. That particular journal entry was folded and then thoroughly taped
shut, with a note on the folded page that said do not read. After prying it open, the intruder would then find at the top of the page, a second line of defense. I had scrawled in desperate red letters:

  WHOEVER IS READING THIS PLEASE! STOP! THIS IS VERY PERSONAL. PLEASE!5

  The beginning of the journal reads as follows:

  Today, I led worship in chapel and nobody entered in. Am I losing the anointing for this mast [note: the word “mast” was scrawled very sloppily to be intentionally illegible because it meant masturbation] thing? I just did it again a second ago. I hate this life SO much. I keep sinning every day so much and I don't seem to care because I'm faithful to do it the next day. The problem is, I know all the right stuff. I know to memorize and quote scriptures. For instance—Jude 24, 1 Cor 10:13, 2 Cor 5:17, Romans 12:1-2 . . . etc. I know them, but when temptation comes, I don't quote them. I know to cry out for help to God, but if I do, it will pass for a second and then come back later. I always give in. I figure if I've already started I might as well finish. I can just repent later. How pathetic! Why am I doing this to myself? Why do I give into Satan and despise God in sin? Why do I willingly give up my anointing for a brief second of painful pleasure? Painful because I know I'm sinning. I may have even violated our covenant today [note: I must have had some “covenant” with God not to look at something]. Michael . . . Why? . . . Jesus. Jesus. Father, what do I even say . . .