Before the World became separate
Radiant Being, Dear Reader,
After some weeks of summer break, I am back at my desk, and we are back together for our weekly Soul-Letters, and given the longer pause, this Soul-Letter will be a more extensive one.
While sitting at one of Montana's gorgeous lakes in Glacier National Park, surrounded by lush forest and high mountains, one question made me reflect:
How did I see the world when I was a child?
… and
What changed?
Why did it change?
Why did life get harder and less playful?
Is it because we take on responsibilities, we have to work for a living, we have to pay taxes, we experience physical or emotional dis-ease, or because we have conflicts with others?
No, none of these!
In this week's Soul-Letter I want to explore something far more subtle: the moment we began dividing a world that, to the child, was still One.
As we grow up, we begin more and more to differentiate, categorize, compare and separate things. Eventually, we fully convince our intellectual mind that the world is separate, while the child still perceives the world largely as it is – unfiltered, mostly unconditioned.
A world where Mother, Grandmother, the tree in the garden, the neighbor, my father's friend's dog, the rain falling from the sky and the little insect crawling across the ground somehow all belong to the same living reality.
The child may distinguish one from another, yet it has not accumulated the immense structure of psychological separation that the adult carries.
Mine and yours.
Important and unimportant.
Beautiful and ugly.
Successful and unsuccessful.
Useful and useless.
Friend and enemy.
Right and wrong.
Worthy and unworthy.
Bit by bit, reality disappears behind the descriptions we have created about reality.
We stop simply seeing the tree.
We see my tree, an old tree, a beautiful tree, a tree that needs trimming, a tree worth money, a tree blocking my view.
The tree has not changed.
Our seeing has.
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."
Perhaps this is one of the deepest qualities of childhood: the world has not yet been completely imprisoned inside definitions.
A child encounters life before constantly asking what life can provide.
Before everything is measured according to usefulness, status, gain, loss, preference, expectation and personal advantage.
And this brings us to something else.
The child does not yet know what "fish-love"* is – conditioned love, which in many cases is merely affection, attachment or preference.
The child knows no notion of Love.
It knows no notion of Peace.
It knows no notion of Harmony.
And precisely there lies something profound.
Not knowing Peace, not knowing Love, not knowing Harmony means, in a certain sense, to be it – to live it.
The child does not need to define Love before loving.
It does not need a philosophy of presence before being present.
It does not require a concept of Oneness before experiencing the world as an indivisible whole.
It simply lives.
Then we grow older.
And the extraordinary irony is that we begin searching intellectually for the very qualities we once expressed naturally.
We read about Love.
We discuss Peace.
We study presence.
We philosophize about Oneness.
We create teachings around Harmony.
We spend years attempting to return through concepts to something that existed before the concepts appeared.
What is "fish-love"?
There is an old story of a fisherman who catches a fish and enthusiastically says how much he loves fish.
A wise monk observes what happens next.
The fisherman removes the fish from the water, prepares it, cooks it and eats it.
So the question arises:
Whom does the fisherman actually love?
If he truly loved the fish for the fish's sake, would his first concern not be the wellbeing of the fish?
What he loves is what the fish provides for him.
Its taste.
Its nourishment.
The satisfaction it gives him.
This is "fish-love."
And much of what we learn to call love as adults quietly follows the same pattern:
I love you because you make me feel good.
I love you because you give me something I need.
I love you because you behave in ways that agree with my image of you.
I love you as long as you continue to fulfill the conditions through which I experience affection toward you.
Once those conditions change, we say:
"I don't love you anymore."
Was it Love that disappeared?
Or did the conditions disappear?
This is an uncomfortable question, perhaps one worth sitting with.
True Love cannot depend entirely upon what another provides.
True Love does not mean accepting every behavior, remaining in every relationship or abandoning discernment.
It means that beneath preference, boundaries and circumstance, separation does not become the final truth.
The other remains another expression of the same Life.
The same One-Mind.
The same mysterious Intelligence appearing through countless forms.
"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."
So what happened to us?
We learned to divide.
We learned the names of everything, then eventually began mistaking the names for the things themselves.
We learned what was desirable and undesirable.
We learned whom we were supposed to admire.
Whom we were supposed to avoid.
What success looked like.
What failure meant.
What kind of body was beautiful.
What kind of life was respectable.
Which beliefs belonged to "us."
Which beliefs belonged to "them."
And gradually, the seamless landscape of childhood became a map covered with borders.
The intellectual mind needs distinctions in order to navigate practical life.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this.
We need language.
We need discernment.
We need to know the difference between a road and a river.
We need to recognize danger.
We need schedules, responsibilities, agreements and boundaries.
The difficulty begins when practical distinction becomes psychological separation.
When the categories created by thought become more real to us than Life itself.
Then we no longer merely use concepts.
We live inside them.
And perhaps this is why adulthood can begin to feel so heavy.
Not because we pay taxes.
Not because we work.
Not because difficulties arise.
Not because the body experiences pain.
Rather because every experience becomes wrapped in interpretation, resistance, expectation, comparison and judgment.
The event occurs once.
The mind may recreate it a thousand times.
Can we return?
Not by becoming children again.
Not by rejecting adulthood.
Not by pretending responsibilities do not exist.
And certainly not by adding yet another spiritual identity to the collection of identities we already carry.
The invitation is much simpler.
Begin noticing where thought divides what Life has never divided, and re-turn to to playfulness.
With simpler words: Don't take life so seriously, play with it like children play with a castle in sandbox.
When you look at someone today, notice how quickly a label appears.
When you look at yourself in the mirror, notice whether you actually see yourself or immediately encounter an accumulated story.
When you walk past a tree, a bird, a stranger, an elderly person, a homeless person, a wealthy person, someone who agrees with you or someone whose worldview differs radically from yours – notice what arrives first.
Seeing?
Or interpretation?
Try, even for a few seconds, to meet what is in front of you before naming it.
Look.
Listen.
Feel.
Allow something to exist without immediately deciding what it means for you.
And whenever judgment or separation appears, there is no need to fight it.
Simply notice it.
Ask:
What was here before I named this?
What remains if, for one moment, I release my story about it?
Can I encounter this life directly?
This is not another technique through which you must reach Oneness.
It is an invitation to notice that Oneness was present before the mind divided it.
The child did not achieve this.
The child simply had not yet learned to obscure it.
And perhaps spiritual maturation is not about collecting ever more knowledge.
Perhaps it is the gradual falling away of everything that prevents us from seeing what has always been here.
The mountain.
The lake.
The dog.
The stranger.
The person you love.
The person you struggle to love.
Your own body.
Your own breath.
One Life appearing through innumerable forms.
Before the world became divided in our minds, it was already whole.
And underneath every division we have learned to create…
it still is.
A Prayer
Great Spirit, Great Mystery, One-Mind,
May I see Life before my judgments about Life.
May I meet others before the stories I have created about them.
May I recognize where affection has become conditional and rediscover the Love that asks for nothing in exchange.
May the walls created by habit, fear and conditioning become transparent.
May I recover the innocence that does not mean ignorance, rather the clarity to see without immediately dividing.
May I remember that beneath every name, every form and every apparent difference, there is one indivisible Life expressing itself.
And may what I recognize within
become the way I meet the world.
All-One.
In Presence,
O-hey-O
Bear Saorin
The One Mind Sanctum
P.S. Perhaps the child in you never stopped seeing the world as One – perhaps the noise of everything you learned simply became louder.
P.P.S. This week, choose one ordinary moment each day and experience it before naming, judging or explaining it. See what remains.
Responses