How are you?
To answer that question, we usually look to the past or the future:
What's been happening in life and how do I feel about it? What's going to happen in life and how do I feel about it?
We take the question as an invitation to reflect on our life and our experience of our life - and then judge it.
The past-based answer to the question is based on what has already happened - and how we judge it.
How well we slept, whether we voted for the person who won, how our students are performing in class, whether our kids and spouse are sick. All in the past, and weighted with our judgments.
There's the past, and then there's our judgments about the past. We mostly live in our judgments about the past (good or bad).
The future-based answer to the question is based on what might happen, what we expect will happen, what we fear will happen, what we hope will happen. We stand on the edge of this moment, look out over the illusory landscape of the future, and judge it. Is it a good outlook, or is it a bad outlook?
Most of our life is spent in this realm of judgment - assessing and evaluating everything we see, hear, feel, and consider. We're living in a vision of the past or a vision of the future in our own minds, and we're judging the present moment based on how it all looks in our heads.
It’s as if the canvas of our consciousness is simply cluttered with all those stories, perspectives, and judgments:
They're not all bad judgments! Some of them are pretty great judgments. (The great ones are still judgments.)
This is what many of us love about babies and little kids. Their canvas is still clear, open, empty. It's also what many of us strive for in meditation, prayer, exercise, seminars, and coaching, a blank canvas:
As we grow up, our families, friends, teachers, religions, cultures, and societies splash paint onto our canvas. Since we’re just kids, we figure they’re right! So we let that paint hangout and dry right where it was splashed.
Middle school and high school are like firehouses of meaning, significance, and judgment shot upon our canvas!
Over time and through embarrassment, shame, and trauma, we begin to run out of room to consciously create on this canvas for ourselves. (Or so it seems anyway.)
And then there are moments of inspiration: Wait! I can erase parts of this canvas! I can create something new!
But it isn’t baked into our education system how to actually clear our canvas consistently and effectively, and those moments of inspiration become fewer and fewer, and we may relate to them more hopelessly and apathetically.
This is the critical gap in our education system. We are creators throughout our lives, but most of us never learn the truth about this inherent ability. Nor do most of us ever learn the way to gently clear the gunk off our canvas, the gunk of spray and spit from someone else’s emotional outburst or our own fears.
We are constantly creating. It’s just mostly unconscious.
Moment by moment, we repaint the canvas of our consciousness with declarations and judgments from the past and tired fears of the future. Then we confuse our own repainting of the past with “the truth about the way things are.”
To the point when even getting asked “How are you?” we don’t look at the moment before us, we instead look at that cluttered canvas and report on our judgments of the circumstances of our lives.
Something else is possible, and one access to it is Mind Mastery.
Much Love. ❤️
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