Don’t let this happen to your dog!!

The subtitle of this picture could be anything … from warnings about leaving water out for your pet on a hot day to the danger of packing material and keeping plastics away from infants and animals.  With the right “facebook farming” tag line you might get a million “likes” by the end of the day.  Images make a profound mark on our selective memory.  In a blink of an eye we can be moved to tears, fears or outrage.  As an old school photochop expert, I learned to be wary of what we see in print more decades ago, than I’d care to count.  Ever wonder if that cute “sleeping” puppy atop of the big mac pumpkin is actually one of the 3-4 million animals euthanized in shelters every year?

Fact is we don’t know, what is behind a picture.  But that doesn’t stop our meaning making mind from casting a story made in stone about what we see, or remembering what we “saw” when we are “forming” an opinion.  Being able to keep the beginner’s mind and accept that “we don’t know” allows us to SEE a bigger picture than what we can peek at through the keyhole of our mind made beliefs.

Indeed if we can’t trust what we “see” how could we possibly rely on our “memory” to tell us the Truth about our experience?  And if the stakes are high and we are invested in a particular version of the pomp and circumstance, we may feel even more certain that what we saw was spot on.

The practice is to consider the possibility that our eyes may deceive us, that our minds may not remember the whole story and that anything we think we know may be an illusion.  No, things are not always what they appear to be, even when they ARE.  And when we accept that we may be WRONG, it doesn’t mean that the other person is RIGHT.  We can sit with the not knowing in our own mind, without insisting everyone else around us do the same.  I don’t need to take your opinion away from you, in order to be confident in my uncertainty.

Ahhh deep breath.  It may not feel good when we give up the notion of knowing.  But only when we are able to do just this … can we feel the joy and bliss in every moment just as it is.

Oh and that “poor puppy”, was peacefully asleep in the sun.  Enjoying the warm rays of the morning light in a moment of serene bliss.  Until of course we went to go wake her up. 🙂