Don’t stop now! Journey into a person

You are walking and see a form. Your mind kicks into gear and you identify the form as a person, a gender, an age. Your perceptions kick in, judgments, assessment and more and more of the person is revealed. If you are a student of medicine, you may assess their general health, if a student of psychology, their emotional state, a student of art, their aesthetic sense, if a student of energy,you will sense their energy and so on, deeper and deeper, or perhaps more and more into the illusion of the form you have encountered.

Do you sense disquiet? Don’t stop now!  Keep going until you sense the peacefulness that has given rise to this disquiet. Do you sense peacefulness? Don’t stop now! Keep going until you sense the creative chaos that underlies that. Do you sense….. the point is not that you keep going deeper.

The point of this exercise is to remember that there are layers in the essence of each being, and you will keep going until you sense what you would like to sense. This is how we mirror each other. The mind is like an arrow, and it can go as deep or as shallow into another as the one who controls the mind would like it to go. If you cannot control your mind, it will just make several pinpricks into the other, and like a pointillist painting, the other’s form will be revealed to you but perhaps not much of their depth.

As you gain control of your mind through the practice of breath awareness, or meditation,  and journey into each other’s presence with a clear focus, more and more of another’s is revealed to you. The purpose determines the focus, and how deep you continue in your journey. It can be friendship when you seek shared interests, a business transaction when you seek the practical aspects of each other’s actions or healing when you seek the healer within.

Today, become aware of the purpose in your encounters with people you see, hear, sense, think of and watch how deeply you enter their presence. Become aware of the choice you make and the skills at your command as you seek to sense and understand each other.

For a moment, you may find that you are always sensing the essence within. For the greatest illusion of them all is illusion itself just as our journey into another leads us to the Self.