Do me a favor. Open both of your hands, palms up.
You have an empty left palm facing up, and an empty right palm facing up.
Imagine that your left hand represents what you feel and experience. In that hand is feelings of happy, scared, excited or nervous. In that hand is experiences of hunger, sleepiness, pain or comfort. In that hand is also your opinions and interpretations of things. The meaning of things originates in that hand. The stories you tell, the habits you experience, your preferences, judgments, beliefs and memories are all in that hand.
Everything in that feeling-and-experiencing-hand is always changing. It comes and goes of its own accord, constantly.
There is no stability to it. You know that, right? Your feelings, experiences, beliefs, habits, memories…they are eternally changing.
When they are present in your awareness they are big. They look and feel like stable truth, like all there is in that moment. But then they change and new feelings, memories and beliefs take their place.
Now look to your right hand. Your right hand represents what’s true.
What’s true doesn’t change, ever. It’s the complete opposite of your feelings and experiences in that way.
It doesn’t come and go of its own accord, it simply is.
In your what’s-true-hand is something very different than fleeting, flowing feelings and experience. It is the stable and unwavering truth that underlies—that creates—our very human, left hand experience.
In your right hand is the fact that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. The fact that energy moves through us bringing left hand, human experience.
Spiritual energy (your right hand) takes form and takes shape within us, giving us the very physical (and therefore very fleeting) stuff in our left hand.
The right hand, stable truth is what’s doing the creating. The left hand experiences are what’s being created.
We humans—probably due the sheer fact of being physical world, flesh and bones people—chronically stare at what’s in the left hand.
It’s in our faces more. It’s dramatic, emotional, urgent, shiny, and jumpy in its ever-changing nature. It’s not surprising that we look there. But it makes us dizzy and confused to try to nail down and make sense of something that isn’t naildownable or logical.
We innocently, mistakenly look for constancy in the left hand because we believe that feeling and experience stuff is us. We’re looking there for answers, for peace, for stability.
We don’t realize that answers, peace, and stability will never be found in what’s being created. Confusion and a merry-go-round of beliefs, feelings and experiences are what we’ll find there and they are anything but certain or peaceful.
Answers, peace, and stability are found in looking toward what’s doing the creating. That’s where you can fix your gaze and relax without things moving and changing so much.
Be curious about what’s doing the creating rather than what’s being created. Look toward what you know is true of you—that you are peace, calm, wisdom and love. Regardless of what you’re feeling or experiencing, you are those things.
It is as simple as looking in the right direction, at what’s true and stable. Everything you want or need is in that space.