It seems to be generally true that when we become enlightened about something the experience is not so much about seeing something we haven’t seen before as it is seeing something we have always seen but with new eyes.  We see from a new perspective.  The thing was always there but our way of relating to it has shifted in a manner that allows us to see it as somehow more real.

I have long heard of this thing called “non-dual awareness.”  It is sometimes spoken of as a sudden revelation and I get that such mystical experiences can be dramatically life changing.  But I have come to see an awareness of the non-duality, the not “two in opposition to each other” of the nature of all things as something we can appropriate into our awareness bit by bit.

Let me say this another way.  There is a perspective which is available to us and by which we can make meaning of the diversity and complexity of reality that is not dependent upon the binary constructions of up and down, on and off, in and out, left and right, Republican and Democrat.  This perspective holds that everything is a part of a complex adaptive system. Or to be a bit more precise, that everything is chaos but that we can tease meaning out of it by seeing it as a system in which the interaction of the objects and forces in the system give rise to newness when we relate to it in certain creative ways.

I don’t really expect the prior paragraph to make sense.  It does to me, but there is so much there to unpack and I am not at all sure that I am saying things in the best way.  So I envision this as the first of a series of posts about this perspective.  I want to try to describe a different way of seeing the events and issues of our day from this point of view.  It will not be strange to you as you see the same things I do.  But it may give you a different way of seeing what has always been there.  And it is my hope that this way of seeing allows for new and creative ways of being.