Life Through Limited Perspective

Spider

Image by Franck Barske from Pixabay

 

We have seven mammals living in our household. Each of us, it seems, has a penchant for continuous hair loss. It isn’t unusual at any given time to find areas of dog, cat, and human hair on the floor, forming temporary, interspecies carpeting.

This morning I watched a spider walking across the floor and attempting to maneuver through one particular hair jungle. Its spindly legs attracted and carried hair strands of similar leg size, causing the spider to pause every so often to shake loose the additional cargo before continuing its journey.

As I watched this little nature documentary happening live on my bathroom floor, I thought about what it would be like to live in the world of that little hiker spider. A world where one would walk across a hard, polished tile, while enormous ropes, in a multitude of sizes, shapes, and colors, clung to your legs. Not to mention, a world where you could, at any moment, be devoured by a ginormous, whiskered feline. Or inadvertently squished by shuffling slippers. It’s a completely different world than my world, yet the exact same world, isn’t it?

The only difference is in the perspective of the experiencer.

I often consider how the object I know of as “my body” appears to the bacteria and other live beings that also reside within it. What I consider my body, they also consider (so to speak) as their body. I experience my body as this large, moving shape I use as a vehicle for awareness. A host, which lives within this body, experiences it as a dark world of seeping moisture, chemicals, and nutrients. What I label as “my body,” a host might label (so to speak) as “my world.” It’s a completely different experience of the exact same object, depending upon perspective.

Even my own experience of my body ignores the reality that it is composed of many different, and seemingly separate cells, almost all of which began as things outside of my body and not things I would normally consider to be my body: food, water, air, impurities, viruses, germs, and an occasional craft beer. It’s a perfect example of how I think I know something so intimately familiar as my own body, when the reality is, I only know it from my own limited perspective.

We can get so attached to our own human, eye-level existence that we ignore the fact our own world is really an illusion. We see what we see and how we see it but we never know the reality of what we are actually experiencing. We don’t hear the variety of sounds in this world that a dog hears, nor can we see the multitudes of colors like a butterfly. Still, these “pieces” of reality exist within the world we occupy and we rarely consider it.

The error is when we believe we “know” anything as it is, or experience reality in its wholeness. Living a life of conditioned and habitual thinking has forced us to label and categorize our experience so we can comfortably believe we know the truth of our world. Actually, we only see distortions, half-truths, and illusions fabricated by our mind. A mind conditioned by our own upbringing, education, society, and opinions. In being satisfied with that mind-created reality, we never know the truth about anything.

To spiritually experience reality, it is necessary to go beyond our mental creations. We transcend our human existence of habitual thought and we experience the world with inner silence. We look at a flower without the mind telling us it is a “flower” or the color “yellow” or that it smells “sweet.” We experience the flower, and everything else, without mental labels, without descriptions and in deep silence and open awareness. It is in this atmosphere that the true nature of the reality of our experience is revealed.

That’s Just Your Opinion, Man

Opinions

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

 

Surprise, it’s okay to not have an opinion about something! In fact, it’s completely acceptable to dump all opinions you currently hold about… well, everything!

I realize that isn’t a very popular opinion. (See what I did there?) We live at a time and in a society that values its opinions about everything from political parties, social movements, restaurant service, video content, social media posts, music quality, advertisement effectiveness, and on and on and on. Almost everything we run across includes a “Like” button, a review space, or a feedback feature and we’re continually pressured to decide what we think and to tell everyone. You’ll even find Like and Share buttons at the end of this article. (You don’t have to use them, you know…)

The essential Being which you are never holds opinions. You are not your mind. That which you essentially are does not, and even cannot, hold mental positions about anything. Clutching opinions forces you to live in a world of abstractions. It prevents you from really knowing the things or experiences you hold opinions about as they truly are.

Opinions keep us mentally locked into a conceptual past rather than consciously residing in presence. They are often based on former experiences or conditionings which prevent us from seeing the reality of what is being experienced now. They don’t allow for the truth that all things change, move, and transform. An opinion is simply a cartoon version of reality.

To not hold on to opinions doesn’t suggest we do not humanly have preferences. We can still enjoy the immediate experience of cardamom ice cream or Cardi B or House of Cards without needing to form an identity around that enjoyment. We do not need to make the dislike of Polka music into part of a personal story of who we are. Enjoy an experience in the present, agree with a religious perspective now, or dislike the food flavor you are currently experiencing, then let it go.

This is not an opinion: to remove opinions from your life is to move closer to the awareness of who you really are.