This is the third piece in The Gifts of Separate Realities. The last one was about the health under every reality. This one is about seeing it.
Your phone lights up, and it’s your mother.
Before you answer, you already know how this will go. What she will ask, what she will mean by it, what you will say back, and the exact point where it will start to feel familiar in the wrong way. You answer. It goes like that.
Nothing is wrong with you, and nothing is wrong with her. It is what happens whenever you meet someone with what you already know about them.
Because that is who you are talking to. Not her. Your knowledge of her, built up over years, made in you, and running the whole conversation before she has said a word. Anything new about her, anything you have never seen in her before, can only come from somewhere else: the place in you that doesn’t know her yet.
That place is where wisdom is. And it is the only place you can see another person from without your picture of them in the way.
What you are actually meeting
“I know her.” It is one of the most ordinary sentences there is, and one of the most closed.
She is living a reality of her own, made inside her through Thought, moment by moment. You have never once been inside it. What you call knowing her is a picture made in you, out of thoughts you had about her yesterday, last year, when you were twelve.
You are not meeting her. You are meeting what you know about her.
And she has moved on from that picture a hundred times. Every person does. The one you knew at twelve, at twenty, last spring, each of them lived a whole reality you can’t go back into, and so did she. People are moving targets. Your knowledge of them is the one thing that keeps standing still.
So the same conversation keeps happening. Not because she never changes, but because what you are listening with never does.
The place that doesn’t know
Under every thought you have about her there is something that has no thought about her at all. The formless. The quiet that is there before anything has been made, and that every experience is made out of.
It doesn’t know her. It doesn’t know anything. That is exactly why something new can come from it.
A quiet mind is not an empty one or a disciplined one. It is a mind that isn’t busy holding the picture up, second-guessing what is going on in her, running yesterday’s knowledge in front of her face. When that settles, what is left is the place in you that doesn’t know. And from there, you see her the way you would see someone you had just met.
That is what wisdom looks like between two people. Not more knowledge about them. Less in the way.
And it has never moved. The same place was there in you as a child, it is there now, and it will be there at the end. Everyone else keeps changing. This doesn’t.
The only steady place to see a moving person from is the place that holds no picture of them.
What changes
The call is the same call. She asks the same question.
But this time you hear it. The tiredness under it, or the worry, or something that has nothing to do with you at all and that you had never noticed, because you already knew what she meant. A sentence comes out of you that you didn’t plan. The conversation goes somewhere it has never been.
Neither of you made that happen. It came up from the place in you that didn’t know where it was going. Every fresh thing you have ever seen in another person came from there, from inside you, where it had been waiting the whole time. That will never stop being remarkable to me.
And it works the other way round too. People can feel the difference between being met and being looked up.
But some things you do know
You know your partner can’t eat nuts. You know your colleague has missed the last three deadlines. You know your father gets quiet when he is hurt.
Keep all of it. Nothing here asks you to forget a fact, or to pretend a pattern isn’t there. The Physical is real, and memory is useful.
What changes is only what does the seeing. Your knowledge can sit beside you in the conversation like a notebook on the table. It just doesn’t have to be the one looking at her.
What this is not
It isn’t “beginner’s mind” as a practice, or a decision to see people fresh. A decision to see someone fresh is one more picture of them, held up a little more kindly.
And it isn’t something you have to keep up. Thinking comes to its own full stop whenever it is seen for what it is, and what is under it is the place that doesn’t know. It is there in every conversation, including the hundred that went the way you expected.
Your phone lights up again, and it’s her.
You still know a great deal about your mother.
And somewhere under all of it there is a place that has never met her, and is about to.
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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.