Credit photo: Paulo P. Pereira
Imagine a glass of water.
Water can enter the glass. Water can leave the glass.
Glass can hold water but glass is not water.
Have you ever noticed?
What is real and true is always present. How can it not be? Reality doesn’t need you, me or anybody. It doesn’t care about us.
Yet we all have a different experience of reality. Isn’t it kind of peculiar? That we all live in something we consider real and solid, yet nobody have the same experience of it.
Not even we, ourselves, have the exact same experience of reality from one moment to the next. If we would go to a certain place one day and visit the same place in, let us say a couple of hours later, we wouldn’t have the same experience of it. We would feel different about it, right?!
Heraclitus wrote,
”No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
Heraclitus makes an interesting observation and what he is trying to tell us is important but let’s leave that for now.
If reality is solid and humans have different and ever-changing experiences of it, it must suggest that there is something else, other than reality, that moves and changes. Have you noticed what it is?
Zen has a way of showing this:
Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, ”The flag moves.” The other said, ”The wind moves.” They argued back and forth but could not agree. Hui-neng, the sixth Patriarch, said: ”Gentlemen! It is not the flag that moves. It is not the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves.”
And the movement in our minds are Thought. Is it not?
This conclusion can lead to an important question. And that is: Can we really trust our thinking?
If not, what can we trust?
When thought comes. What does it come to?
When thought leaves. What does it leave?
Glass or water. Both or neither.
What do you prefer? What seems more real?
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About the author: Patrik Rowinski is a specialist of State Of Mind and mindset change. He is the Co-Founder of StateOfMind Institute, 3P Center Stockholm and Mindset Factory from where he helps Organisations, Leaders, Teams and Individuals to bring breakthroughs in performance, results and well being.