This is the second piece in The Gifts of Separate Realities, which takes the gifts of one fact one at a time. The first was about listening.
Think of a friend who has been having a hard time for a long while. Months, maybe years.
Somewhere along the way, a picture of her settled in. She’s anxious. She’s stuck. That’s just how she is now. You didn’t decide on it. It formed on its own, and now it’s what you see when she walks in.
Nothing is wrong with you for that. It’s what anyone sees who takes a person’s reality to be a fact about them.
It isn’t one. And once that’s seen, something else becomes visible in her, even when she can’t see it herself.
What you’re looking at
What she is living right now is a reality made inside her, through Thought, in this moment. Whole, and entirely hers.
It isn’t who she is, and it isn’t kept anywhere from yesterday. A reality has no power to keep itself going. It is made fresh, moment by moment, and the next moment can bring a completely different one.
So the anxiety you see in her is real. It’s the reality she is living. But it’s what is being made in her, not what she is.
What it’s made from
Every reality, hers and yours and everyone’s, is made from the same place: the formless, before any thought has taken shape. It is the same in every human being.
That is where fresh thought comes from. Insight, wisdom, the moment something suddenly looks different. It can’t be used up, and it can’t be damaged, because nothing ever happened to it. Everything that happens is made from it.
This is what wellbeing is. Not a good mood, and not having your life in order. It’s the source every reality is made from, and it is never lost, in anyone.
A reality is what is being made. Wellbeing is what it’s made from.
So the possibility of something completely new is there in her right now, however long the hard time has lasted.
What health is measured by
So health isn’t measured by how someone feels right now. A good feeling can come from either direction, and so can a hard one.
It is measured by which paradigm someone is living from.
Outside-in, the answer is always somewhere out there. A different job, a different partner, a better week. How you feel depends on something outside changing first, and until it does, you wait. That is the paradigm almost everyone was handed.
Inside-out, nothing out there has to change first. You are turned toward what comes from inside: insight, wisdom, fresh thought, coming up out of the formless intelligence every reality is made from.
That is the whole difference. Someone can feel fine and be entirely dependent on the outside. Someone can be in the worst month of their life and be facing the right way.
Why separateness makes it visible
As long as you believe you share one world with her, her reality looks like a report on that world. Her gloom seems to be telling you how things are. You either argue with it, or you start to half believe it. Either way, you are looking at what her reality contains.
Once you see that her reality is made in her, and yours in you, you stop reading her by its contents. You can see that a reality is being made, and what it is being made from.
That is when her health becomes visible. Not because she feels better. She may not.
You’re no longer looking only at what is being made.
People often feel the difference. Being seen as someone whole who is having a hard time is not the same as being seen as a problem.
But some people are really unwell
Someone is deeply depressed, or grieving, or in crisis.
Their suffering is real, and so is their need for care, including professional care. Seeing their wellbeing doesn’t change any of that.
It also doesn’t mean telling them they’re fine, or that they should see it too. It doesn’t need to be said at all. It changes where you are looking from, not what you say.
And it may matter most exactly there. Someone at the bottom is usually surrounded by people who can only see the bottom.
What this is not
It isn’t positive thinking about people, or deciding to see the best in them. That’s a new picture laid over the old one, and it has to be kept up.
And it isn’t something to practice. The same thing is working in everyone, all the time, and once that’s seen, the health under every reality is simply there to see.
She walks in, and she is still having a hard time.
You see that too.
And under it you see what her reality is being made from, as whole in her as it has ever been in anyone.
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The list of gifts this series works through comes from Keith Blevens and Brett Chitty’s program The Miracle of Separate Realities. The writing is mine, and so are any errors in it. Whatever you saw here, you saw.
The small book is The Gifts of Separate Realities, and it is free. The long way round, where the fact under all of this is laid out in full, is Reality Is an Inside Job.