Prabhat ponders how two groups of people look at, seemingly, the same occurrences and see diametrically different things.
The strange events that preceded and followed the 2016 election in the US of A, especially the great rift between the adherents and opponents of the newly elected president, brought into clear focus a phenomenon that I have looked at for a long time.
It was clear from listening and watching that the two groups of people look at, seemingly, the same occurrences and see diametrically different things. Each group, fed by its own dedicated sources of information and instructions was certain that the way they see things is, not better, but the only way to see things if you are what you value in a human.
On a grand scale it is easy to see. Every country, every tribe is divided roughly in two where one group wants a conservative, moral, religious environment while the other wants a liberal democratic free society, but this is but a tip of an iceberg as this rift goes down all the way to form a gap in your most intimate bonding. A moment comes when you converse with your best friend or with your beloved, your child, and what to you looks obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt, proven irrefutably, conflicts with the similar conviction but with an altogether different interpretation with its own set of exhibits.
Mostly we pay no attention and dismiss the whole thing as a stupid argument, though once in a while when intensity is brought to bear by an external circumstances the difference in the orbits in which each of us moves, is glaring.
The deeper you look into it the more palpable is the understanding that a side effect of the most exciting aspect of life’s creativity, the profound mechanism that uses chance to make certain that everything is always one of a kind, is that everyone is moving in a unique solitary orbit.
Not just when arguing, also when agreeing. Different orbits, agreeing to different things. Always different.
So as not to be lonely we mesh our different orbits forcefully together creating an extra velocity in the process that cancels itself out, but not before consuming enough of our limited energy as to exhaust us thoroughly, but all this time we remain fixed in our unique orbit where no one else is possible.
When we identify with the space that is enclosed by our orbit and imagine it real, we get annoyed and distracted or exuberant and content with similarly imaginary spheres. This in turn creates all the chaos and complexity that life is, but when we don’t identify, when we sense only the thin path that leads each one in a different trajectory, we see that there is nothing we can do to affect another’s course even a tiny little bit. In fact, hardly anything we can do about our own orbit other than choosing between riding it with our eyes open (otherwise known as awareness or consciousness) or with eyes tightly shut.
Sometimes, as I have experienced, you may find yourself in the presence of someone with such clear energy that all the different little orbits around him align. That is a great gift.
It is a great gift because it creates harmony and because it reminds you that you are special only in as much as everything else is special. And that the orbit you are assigned arbitrarily is only what it is, free of the burden you attach to it.
A taste of this may accompany you from now on so that a momentarily burst of rightness, certainty or self-adulation is gently replaced by the comforting remembrance that we all move in different orbits and where we intersect there is void.
Eppur si muove!
All this came to me while lying in a hammock in my free zone, thinking about how different I see the events of the Great Experiment known as Rajneeshpuram than, say, my friend Toby, and all the while swifts in their hundreds flew over me with infinite grace, each in his own dissimilar direction.
Quote by Galileo Galilei – ‘And yet it moves.’
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