Let me start with a joke, ok?
Jim and Edna are both patients in a mental hospital.
One day while they are walking past the hospital swimming pool, Jim suddenly jumps into the deep end. He sinks to the bottom of the pool and stays there.
Edna promptly jumps in to save him. She swims to the bottom and pulls Jim out. When the hospital director becomes aware of Edna’s heroic act, he considers her to be mentally stable. He goes to tell Edna the news and says, “Edna, I have good news and bad news.
“The good news is you’re being discharged; since you were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of another patient, I have concluded that your act displays sound mindedness.
“The bad news is that Jim, the patient you saved, hung himself in his bathroom with his robe belt right after you saved him. I am sorry, but he’s dead.”
Edna replies, “He didn’t hang himself, I put him there to dry. How soon can I go home?”
This is a joke, but it is closer to how it is than you think.
We (all) live in a world of our own design. We create or accept meanings, and then they become the “reality” of our world.
The currency of created worlds is meaning.
We are born innocent, and we are born without things meaning anything. Slowly but surely the world teaches us what things should mean, and entrap us in their own miserable world: hey, misery loves company.
When, occasionally, they find a human who was brought up by animals (or savages) they start to teach them the meanings we all supposed to know… and then the innocent world of the now grown man is shattered and they either go mad or kill themselves, like John in the book ‘Brave New World.’
But things do not carry an inherent, innate meaning: they in fact don’t mean anything.
All the meaning comes from you. And therefore all the misery comes from you too.
It’s layers upon layers upon layers of meanings that are covering reality like guano (pigeon turd) covers the rocks.
We don’t have time to remove the meanings that millennia of human mind activity put on reality. The only escape we have, today, is to move back, step back to no-mind.
When you look at the world from no-mind, the world is beautiful. People are beautiful. Or funny. Or hysterical.
There is no horrible in death, there is no scathing in my speaking upon correcting a student, and there is no threat in your boss talking to you.
They are all meanings that keep you stuck, keep you miserable, only pretending to want to grow, become all you can be.
What you mean, really, is “all I can be inside this prison I have built for myself and you.”
The prison is build brick by brick from meanings.
There is no light, there is no chance for happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction, creation, intimacy, courage, adventure, growth in it.
If you want to really grow, you may want to try this no-mind place… it is lovely, and it is learnable.
It needs you though: it is your birth right but it won’t come to you. You have to come and claim it.
I teach it on the connection classes, in my activator classes, in every class I teach. And soon, I hope, I will have another empathic person be able to teach more classes so we can accommodate more people.
The new humanity, and the new world is going to be able to tell the difference between mirage and reality.
It’s not as gory or depressing as they show it in the Matrix. In fact mirage is depressing and reality is lovely.
I promise.
Sophie, I think you know just how much I appreciated this article. Thank you!
And no, my boss is not a threat. I can see that now 🙂 Thank you for wiping my glasses! 🙂