"We don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are."
- David Lewis Anderson
That is one of the most profoundly liberating quotes I have ever heard. It originated from the mind of Space/time physicist, David Lewis Anderson, as I heard him discuss it on a radio show several months ago.
To fully comprehend the breathing potential this implies is staggering.
It tells us that the gold standard for sentiency does not lie in the 'out there'; in the functional, linear backdrop of our objective reality, but rather that all that is emanates from all that we are.
It tells us that there is no division apart from what we choose to regard as different, as other.
It tells us that there is no existing plan for perfection apart from the one we feel the need to implement.
It tells us that the color of love is every color and that the presence of hate is seeded in our shadow side; our unexamined bitterness, envy, sloth, judgement and resentment.
It tells us that we are not the oppressed, the victims, the captives. It tells us that we are the liberators.
As long as I can remember, I've been attempting to drive home to my, now adult, kids that the only thing we have any control over in this life is our ability to respond to it.
We can choose to see ourselves as hapless victims of an overwhelmingly brutal outpost of celestial consequence and respond to life with reactive bitterness or fear limiting our capacity to love, or we can willingly embrace the nature of a presence beyond time and know with unquestioned certainty that whatever we face in this earthen crucible of grace is truly a gift; one provided to refine and to transmute the husks of human dross into the flaxen gold of impossible love.
My father has always advised me to let go of retributive emotions. He warned me against 'burning my bridges' because you never know if you might need to cross them again and you can't ever be fully aware of the hurt and injured you might have left stranded on the other side.
I see all these principles as one. It is one that speaks in the faint tongue of conscience to the often proud enterprise of the soul and it says, "Love, forgive, and let it go."
On my best days I hold these admonishments so close to the hub of my fallible humanity I can fairly taste their transformational pallor. On my worst, I linger too far outside myself to appreciate anything beyond apathy and confusion.
Most days are somewhere in the middle: caught between the pressing and peevish clamoring of my pedestrian sensibilities and the cloying persuasion of my human desires and the intractable insight of a divinity within me that begs no introduction yet is too often left unaddressed.
But the larger quest continues. I suppose that one day I may come close to grounding logic in sacred thought, but for now I just get up each morning and hope to end the day having left better moments in my wake.
I don't have anything else to say for now, but I'm not done thinking...... Don't change that dial.
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