11/15/2020
“Why do you write,” she asked. “I write to set myself free,” I said.
“Why do you work with horses,” she asked. “To have a lived experience of Unity and Communion with the Divine.”
“Why do you knit,” she asked. “I knit to know myself as a creator of worlds, to bring formless ideas into form.”
“Why do you teach,” she asked. “I teach to love, to be in love in the world.”
“Well then, go ask a friend,” she said. “If I ask for another’s assessment or impression of me, the response can only be based on observed traits and behavior. It’s a distortion and a story that attempts to express the other’s experience of me in words. It’s downstream of the information that is true and relevant about me. By the time it’s behavior it’s already too late, it’s clouded by perception and internalized distortions, on both sides. I’m not looking to shape behavior. How useful is knowing what another person has concluded about me, and then assume there’s something true about what they think? Maybe it’s interesting, but is it true or important? Does it help free me to be more of who my True Self is here to be?”
“What is the risk in hearing it?” she asked. “Because it’s speaking to the wrong self, about the wrong self. It addresses the conditioned narrative-self.”
If I ask a friend, even a really close friend,
“What moves me?
“What makes my heart leap up and compels me to follow it?
“What do I find almost too beautiful to bear?
“What heals me?
“What catches my breath?
“What makes my heart soar with joy?
“What stills my inner world so completely that it’s new again for a moment, or a lifetime?
“What softens me to the world?
“Whose life do I know of that strikes awe in me…?”
“How could another possibly respond to that?”
“Also, when I ask another to offer a reflection or assessment or an opinion about what she knows of me, aren’t I repeating a part of the conditioned narrative that got me into this state of uncertainty and confusion about who I am and what I’m here for? It’s the habit of granting authority and agency to others that clouds my own insight and obscures what I know to be true.”
“But how do you see the parts of you that you can’t see?” she asked. “When I’m looking in the direction of Origin, the silent place before thinking and behavior, the place from which the impulse and aspiration to be arises, then I’m giving attention to that which is aware. When I look in that direction, I see my Soul’s original nature.”
Spark of Mind 