You are talking to me, I listen, I hear you.
Yet, ultimately, I realize I just don’t know what you are truly expressing. I understand words and concepts of a mutually shared language, so we can explore an apparent mindscape of an apparent reality and truth. But truth is, there is no such thing as “reality” that we share, except for an interpretation of apparent understanding of concepts, in case of resonance and sympathy.
I might say then, I understand how you feel. But I don’t. This world of sensations is far too complex to fathom it. It’s simple in its directness, rawness, immediacy, though. But making a story out of it is all about distortion and eventually confusion.
The first-aid kit of interpretation is vast – a treasure chest filled with cultural, religious, and spiritual conditioning, along with countless belief systems.
Life absorbs all of it while simply and effortlessly happening. It is indifferent to consent, preference, judgment, understanding, or belief.
You might rescue yourself under the umbrella of right and wrongdoing. This may offer the illusion of control over your behavior and attitude – choosing what seems right and avoiding what seems wrong, imagining yourself as the empowered doer of your life.
And when life happens without your consent, you find comfort in the concepts of the victim and the perpetrator, karma, responsibility, guilt and redemption, and higher purpose.
As we share this conversation, navigating the mental constructs of truth and reality, interconnectedness quietly absorbs us. It knows nothing of “you” or “me”, as we arise only in each other’s imagination. The breath we share does not exclude the apparent murderer in the room, you have to let it into your lungs. The boundaries we set for survival are merely imagined, serving both the body and the illusion of a self.
The self is a fictional creation: a paradox that embodies both the perceived separation and disconnection of the “ego”, and the imagined divine oneness of the “soul” – a kaleidoscope of vivid stories and characters, made up from experience, conditioning, memories, sensation, thought and identification. The self wants to get rid of itself in its appearance of suffering and resistance, and become the eternal higher, true self as an infinite appearance of bliss, love and light.
It creates stories of awakening and liberation as a hope to escape its self-created prison of narratives of suffering, and its ambition to achieve enlightenment reinforces the very illusion it seeks to transcend.
But when your idols, which seemingly carry all the attributes and virtues that fulfill your ideas of self-realization and enlightenment are dying of cancer, or have to face any other debilitating condition, your belief in a sage’s higher purpose for the collective gives you solace and hope, that life is just not meaningless, that it makes a difference what to do and how to do – while the average man in your mentally fabricated world with such a fate might be an example of having unresolved karmic issues, having been on the wrong path and not listening to his soul.
Though our shared realities remain dreamlike interpretations, with us as vivid characters in each other’s dream, our breath effortlessly dissolves separation – requiring neither recognition nor realization.
It simply is.
