A reminder that today (March 1st), I will not be holding my usual Sunday Zoom as I will be a guest speaker for a meeting sponsored by Open Circle Center at that same time (10-11:30 am Pacific). To register and obtain the Zoom link for the Open Circle
event today, click here.
WE HAVE NOT BEEN HERE BEFORE
The conventional view is that there is a kind of stasis or regularity to things and experiences and that this stability defines our lives. We imagine that things are, for all intents and purposes, more or less the same from moment to moment. This is how the world of experiences and circumstances appears recognizable. Some mental-emotional state arises and we recognize that pattern; it feels familiar: “Oh yeah, I know what that is. It’s fear…or it’s joy.”
Similarly, we see some object or return to some place and recognize it as more or less the same object or place we’d previously visited: “Oh sure, that’s my car or my house or my friend or the neighborhood I live in…”
However, true as it may seem that experiences and objects have a kind of persistence or continuity to them from moment to moment, that they are essentially what they were when we last encountered them, the fact is that they are not, at least not exactly. Your friend or that emotion you’re being visited by may look, feel, or behave in such a way that makes it seem recognizable to you. But the fact is that we have never actually experienced this moment before. Yes, experiences appear and feel very familiar to us. But true as that sense of familiarity may be, the reality is that we’ve never actually felt this particular moment, at least not in this exact way. No experience, no moment, no person, place, or thing is ever quite the same owing to its radically dynamic, non-static, alive nature.
Imagine being transported to another world, a planet that is utterly foreign to you. Not a single thing about this extraterrestrial world could possibly be familiar or known to you because you’ve never actually seen, felt, touched, or tasted any part of it before.
Now imagine your everyday experience to be this hypothetical foreign land. Whatever way you might conventionally describe what’s happening—holding a glass of water in your hand, seeing a cloud-filled sky, hearing the sound of traffic on the street, feeling the wind upon your face—just go ahead and notice whatever is present here, traveling through this heretofore unseen world, exploring the remarkable experiential landscape that lies before you.
Since everything is new to you here, don’t bother referring to any previously learned names or descriptors to make sense of what you’re seeing because those categories no longer apply. You’re literally in a different world now!
Just behold the infinite detail, depth, and dimensionality that is here, not one iota of which you have ever seen nor will you ever see again. Let the truth of this sink in, this astounding fact that you cannot possibly know what this world is that you are experiencing right now, for one simple reason: you have never actually been here before!
(from the book, This Extraordinary Moment)
