Stay to the Center

Oftentimes throughout my day, which are as unvaried and more often than not boring as anyone else’s, I stop to breathe. On a practical and superficial level, this “1-minute-meditation” is cognitively worthless, although having benefits for stress-management and the like. To me however, this simple act is of incredible importance. Many of the great thinkers within our history more or less have eventually come to reconcile with the idea of “oneness”; the concept that rather than being individual, categorized and self-identifying beings, driven by the concepts of money, the perpetual pursuit of Success, and the building and maintenance of skill or knowledge; we are all part of something far greater and more important than any of those manufactured and peddled ideas are.. that we are all one. This idea has essentially been decimated by Western media, who repeatedly tells us implicitly that we are all essentially powerless, of little worth, expendable, ugly and above all else, to be feared.

This is important because it ultimately leads to a loss of one of the most important human characteristics. This universal emotion is nowhere to be found in the perpetrators during times of war, slavery, epidemic or apathy. It is an emotional ability greatly lost in our society of Success. This emotion is empathy, the ability to essentially view the world through the eyes of another and understand the mechanisms behind their opinions or actions. This type of insight is of immeasurable power to the bearer, allowing one to grasp an issue in the purest sense, and apply a solution with the most compassion and effectiveness possible. But more importantly, it allows to bearer to understand the commonality between all beings that exist, and therefore see the Oneness in it’s purest form. Free from money, deities of any kind, greed and urgency, we are able to experience reality in it’s truest form, rather than reality as perpetrated by a select group of people motivated by these same hindrances.

This is the root of what it means to be a human being; and in all of our attempts to identify ourselves through the skills we have, the ideals we hold, which political puppet we agree most with, our jobs, down to what music we like and what clothes we wear, we have appallingly and deliberately missed this point.

This is what I experience during my minute of breathing; the realization that I am fluid, and live my choice of love over fear, expansion of thought over dogma, and empathy over indifference. Through these basic principles I am free to experience reality as we have since the dawn of time, prior to our illusions of money, excess, success and elitist socioeconomic, national and religious segregation. Fuck it all.

Of course I am not naive enough to believe I am not influenced by these things. However, I believe I possess the power to acknowledge the presence of these phenomena in my life, choose for myself which are justified, potentially harmful or beneficial, and the like, and take action on them based on what I feel it best for me.

If you have been reading this striving to understand my standpoint, to attain in essence this “empathy’ I have been preaching, you have missed the point entirely.

“The words are fingers pointing at the moon; if you watch the finger you can’t see the moon” – Lao Tzu

Instead, live the words. Breathe them. Take action according to them. The end result will be what you, as well as I strive to understand and conceive.