It wasn’t until my massive insight while living in Budapest that I realized the rest of you were taking your thoughts seriously. That answered a lot of questions about why people did what they did. But it also presented some new questions like; is there a way to bridge those realities?
The simple answer is: yes. you can bridge them with any genuine connection. The Greeks had a lot of words for love because it could arrive as romance or it could arrive as a friend’s wisdom (which is separate from people’s advice). Or love could come in the form of brotherly support, motherly care, a stranger’s compassion, a partner’s tolerance, a sexual connection with a lover, or the meaning in a work of art—these are all forms of love.
Whether it’s sexual and we’re literally inside each other, or whether it’s over space and time and we are connected to an artist via a work of art, we are connected. At that point we do not see difference. We perceive that they are experiencing the same thing as us. We are sharing an experience.
The universe has fractured into definitions. Our subject and object view of the world keeps creating greater and greater sub-definitions. We find more out in space and more in the sub-atomic world. We find new diseases and species. We discover past discoveries have been wrong and we split them into new categories. We file and sort and define and order and value. So when we look at people it’s easy to sort them, file them and then react to that instead of to the person we actually see in front of us.
Don’t make your spirituality something separate from your day. Don’t make the management of your psychology something you only do when you’re suffering. Become conscious instead. It feels wonderful and it allows you to steer past so many obstacles that you would otherwise collide with. But to do that you have to surrender labelling the world for being present within it.
We know love as a feeling. We can quiet our thoughts when we’re enthralled in love. Well we can do the same thing with peace or with silence or with the present moment. They are also things that can so fully occupy our being that we don’t have room to construct a personal identity to have personal thoughts. We are simply having an experience. There’s no one having it. It’s just an experience experienced.
As you move through your day try to genuinely connect with the people you engage with. Don’t talk to them as a role or an identity or from a role or identity. See them in that moment as though you were told they were going to surprise you somehow today. Watch for the surprise. Be awake. It will change you.
It’s hopefully for 70-100 years. Accept that this play we’re all performing in requires us all to have separate roles—separate ways of seeing the world. Life is the interaction of those views. Things aren’t going wrong when we tangle with others for better or worse. The tangling is what it is to be alive. And when you accept that and make friends with where you are and the moment you’re in, you’re life changes dramatically.
Endeavour to be conscious. It’s not hard and it’s easily worth it. You’ll have more energy, clarity, emotional control and you’ll end up happier in the end. And you are easily worth that and more.
Have an awesome day.
peace. s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
