Separated

To manage our world we break that which is too large to understand in one go into smaller components, and try to understand the whole by describing the smaller parts. And when we put it all back together we're surprised to find the whole to be more than the sum of it's parts...

_{source: YouTube}

Our western mindsets are a result of centuries of fragmentation, of subdividing all aspects of our universe into manageable bites, beginning with the separation of the self. I am here, and the world is "out there." Then we separate eternity into past, present and future; "now" is the infinitesimal small point in time where past and future get separated, and therefore we never live in the now, always thinking about the past and planning for the future. When one year ends, we give the new year a new number, so we can start over, subdividing another year into months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds. But time is just another way of separation, of measuring. In reality "now" is the only real time and it is eternal; it's always "now." This reminds me of an old Chinese proverb: "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

Science as developed in the western cultures, tries to find answers about the nature of reality by breaking up reality into ever smaller parts. The largest man-made machine in history, the Large Hadron Collider, is dedicated to that goal specifically: it accelerates sub-atomic particles to almost light-speed in opposite directions on a 27 km circular track, to smash them together, breaking them up in even smaller parts. We've separated the universe into quanta and Planck units, dividing an unimaginable large universe into unimaginable small measures of time, length, mass and energy.

In society too we have this unstoppable urge to reduce everything to its smallest components; we see our society as a collection of separated individuals as opposed to a whole that's made up of interconnected persons. That's because we've separated our true self from our personality. When we think about ourself, we think about our personality. Self-consciousness is the ability to be aware of one's own awareness. We can think about our thoughts and about our actions. But our thoughts are not who we are, they are a representation of who we are, much like the menu in a restaurant is the representation of the food, or the lines on a map the representation of the land. Of these two, the food and the land are the real things, just like your true self is the real thing and your thoughts are not.

All this is hard to grasp for someone like me, who perceives the world with a western mindset, and measures everything, forgetting that the measurement is not the thing. Money isn't wealth, it's a measurement of wealth. You can't eat your money when stranded on an island. To survive you need plants, animals and companionship, and that is real wealth. 2022 is just a number, one of the many divisions we've made in the whole that is reality. We are not apart, everything relates to everything else and does so continuously in an everlasting now. Have we, by constantly breaking reality into manageable bits, by always wanting to measure and quantify, separated ourselves from a magnificent truth?

Listen to Allan Watts in the video below; he's so much better at explaining why it's important to overcome our stubborn habit of separating ourself from reality by measuring, labeling and categorizing it. And he has a gong to. And I have no time left ;-)

The above is a redacted version of a post I originally released on Steemit in December 2018

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