How often do you truly penetrate the limitations of your self-made perceptual filters? The realm of “Suchness”, which is the foundation of reality, is such a saturating experience that for us to ever experience the mundane and boredom means that we are wholly captivated by the themes that limit our experiential access to this reality.
These themes serve as defenders of our nakedness, but ironically they bring us to shame more often than not. They cause us to see division between us and everything else that exists. Our minds have created these themes during times when we lacked the skill to see the high costs associated with adopting them, and then they become solidified with habitual practice of perceiving the world in these very warped ways. Soon we wrong those that wrong us, despise those that don’t look like us, dehumanize people for their weaknesses, and view these thoughts and actions as appropriate for the defense and sustaining of our “self”.
My 7 year old daughter has been fascinated with water her whole life. She has never reached the stage of her perceptual filters where she has contrived a theme that makes the presence of water mundane. She sees it as a magical substance, without any explanation and reveres it as such with every encounter. As we grow up we begin to lay down these themes of convenient symbols and ideology that serve as filters and guardians from the realm of “Suchness” that brings total saturation of our experience.
The timeline of Life supplies us with many scheduled experiences that inspire us with a breath of this realm. Marriage, Love, and Friendship are gravitational forces that encourage us to expand the limitations of our experience into the life of someone else. For some this is the only time that they lose that sense of self that stifles the spirit of life altogether. Children also provide this pull toward the experience of selflessness that can temporarily liberate us from the oppression of our own filters.
We must take advantage of these small windows of opportunity to perceive the superior value of dissolving these warped perceptions, and then do the hard work of walking mindful of when we are using these harmful themes. Every time that we identify their presence we must challenge them by looking deeply into their nature and seeing them for how ridiculous they are.
I know that if we walk mindful of our thoughts and actions, that we can relieve much of our own and others’ suffering.
Peace
Loren
Entering the Stream 