On Transforming Others

Ye who are PUSHERS of your perceptions…

Consider instead being a nonchalant *sharer* of your personal truth.

Don’t make of your insights a religion.
Don’t make of your discoveries an orthodoxy.
With a hidden agenda of conversion… of others, from their way to your way.

Make it *not* your mission to corral others into being more like you.

For this impulse is at the core of so much of human interaction.

It’s so natural we don’t even notice it!
This default declaration that, “I am right and you are wrong.” Followed by an adamancy that, “I am good and you are bad.”

We take the intrinsic and inborn differences between us and turn them into problems.

We take the power, magic, and INEVITABILITY of our human diversity and turn it into warfare.

We turn friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers alike into adversaries.
Enemies, even.
In our mad dance-off…
of WE and THEY.

Cordoning ourselves off.
Sorting ourselves out.
All because of varying outlooks.

We spot a difference…
We can’t BE with it.
We don’t have the bandwidth for it…
and we don’t have a true understanding of it.

But instead of noting this lack within us—instead of clocking this lack of capacity to SEE the other accurately—we judge the other.

We stubbornly view the other through our own narrow filter and golly gee… wouldn’t you know it… they come up narrow!! They come up short!!

THEY are small… THEY are narrow.
That’s what WE think.

Little do we realize it’s our own narrow filter that’s the actual problem.
WE are coming up short.

It’s HOW we see that’s the problem.
Not WHAT we see.

It’s our interpretive apparatus that’s the glitch.
Yet we insist the thing we’re interpreting is glitchy.

We don’t truly understand what we’re looking at, and in many cases we don’t even try. We just go with what our limited lenses tell us.

Confirmation bias runs the show.
We’re gathering… stockpiling… endless evidence for what we already believe.

We’re locked in a state of “always already knowing”…
going with what we already take to be a given.

Lazy. Sloppy. Indolent.
This predilection for presupposing, presuming, and prejudging.
Without the reflection and examination that’s warranted.

Love + Oneness,
Naomi