2020 Week 36 Contemplation Thoughts
You may be interested in my blog post History of Words ~ Other
- So much fear and hate around this in our history
- Again, separation plays a very strong role. Separation seems to be behind our worst tendencies
- Why is something other, something different, so often met with wariness, fear, anger instead of curiosity, welcoming, love
- Maybe some of the dislike or fear of the other is that it shakes us out of our routine and our safety-blanket type belief that we can anticipate and control life. The other does not behave in a way that we can anticipate and expect, or the other behaves in a way that is opposite to the way we have chosen. We can’t make sense of it and this puts us on edge
- Space, the space between objects, is the main factor of our idea of a separate other. But if time and space are an illusion, as some have said?
- What if we held ‘other’ to mean “the other part of the whole of which I am a part” rather something separate? Like in the old sense of the word
- The meaning I have for ‘other’ now is “different perspective”. I don’t mean different perspective as just a different opinion. For example, I am the Universe experiencing itself as a human named Abueng. That over there is the Universe experiencing itself as a bookshelf. And my experiencing is not more valuable than the bookshelf’s experiencing.
- This top down way of looking at things feels whole