Leaving Our Self-Created Box

Our environment constantly attempts to place us in the box that some call “I”. This box is a limiting box. The big box your self-created box is found within could be called your city, your town, your state, your country, even this planet. That box is one built upon ignorance of true reality.

Everything has always been here and will always be. It just looks so different; it just feels so different. The difference is simply our mind attempting to rationalize what we are from the rest of what is: a completely understandable approach. Embrace this approach, with a curiosity that, perhaps, it is mistaken.

This does not mean we ignore our reality, or our seeming separateness from others, or other things. It does mean that we honor our present understanding and open ourselves to a more whole understanding.

If we examine an organism, or even a simple object, we can see it with our own eyes, and also realize our eyes do not allow for complete understanding. We do not see the organs within, the blood that pulses through the heart, the nerves that lead up to the brain, sending signals to the rest of the body. Yet, these organs, this blood, those nerves exist.

We can look at a painting. A painting is a fabrication involving matters and energies placed on a canvas or in a space. It is meant to be a representation of some thing, some one, some of what we may not know how to describe in any other way but with matter and our energy. It gives the illusion of three-dimensional living and that those three-dimensions not actually exist within the painting itself. The mind expands the two-dimensions of the painting and allows it to expand into our three-dimensional understanding of our world and our life. Yet, the painting is inanimate, is nearly two-dimensional, yet we see depth, height, length where none actually exists in our reality.

Examine a photograph. A nearly perfect representation of a paused moment of time. There are so many aspects that are eclipsed in a photo. The camera. The picture-taker. The entire background and backdrop. A picture ignores all the moments, all the matter, all the energy that feeds into that one, paused moment of time. The picture is not perfect. Neither is our memory. A picture, like memory, ignores what’s outside the lines, or behind the lines.

Learning to leave our self-created box takes concerted effort, extreme patience and a never ending supply of attempting understanding. The box is an illusion that we believe is true. Simply, open your mind and awareness to other possibilities, to other potentials.