We’ve all had the experience of labeling someone and then seeing that person from a critical perspective. Recently, a fellow inmate was moved into the prison dormitory who spoke with a loud and abrasive manner. I found myself judging him from his speech. Then, during a two-week period when I was without a television, he brought his to me and cheerfully declared, “Here, you watch mine for awhile.” After that, his voice seemed softer and more pleasant to me.

We build these images of things in our daily environment rather quickly. Those images prevent us from actually seeing those around us. They become our reality. For example, immediately upon entering a museum we want to know who painted the picture. If we have heard of him or her, it is a “good” picture. If not, we’re not so sure until someone who has heard of the artist sets us straight on the matter. But is what’s important the fame and reputation of the artist or the actual work in front of our eyes? Yes, our eyes – not someone else’s – not those of a scholar or critic. With our eyes, free of labels and judgments, we find new meanings and new ways of seeing and dealing with life. Then our ears will be filled with our own music and our eyes will be colored with our own vision.

Not only the things in our lives, but even more importantly, we’re quick to label and judge each other even when we know so little about what another carries in his or her heart. The difficult ones around us can teach us steadiness and compassion. We are grist for one another’s mills. When we see the divine Spirit within all beings, judgments are tempered, labels fall away, and a wise and natural response will emerge.

The Bigger World

THE NARROW CONFINES of this prison yard sometimes seem to close in on me. Its restrictions challenge me to make extra effort to look outside my small world and see a bigger world.

As the mind goes beyond the ordinary, beyond its small knowing, it overflows its banks and becomes the heart. The boundaries of the rational dissolve into a feeling of the great spaciousness. This vastness just beyond the understandings of our small selves is a joy that depends on nothing for its existence, a timeless clarity that has no history, no past or future, but only the living presence of Being.

Ironically, it is in the heart rather than in the mind that we discover true rationality – that which seeks the best for all beings – an inclination toward healing that even acknowledges the value of our pain. It learns to let go and trust the process. It knows there is an alternative to our well-guarded suffering.

My life was like a crowded garage where I kept bumping into the furniture and judging myself. Now it’s like I’ve moved into an airplane hanger with the doors left open. Much of the old “stuff” is still there yet it doesn’t limit me. It has been transformed by my acceptance.

May we all reach beyond the narrowness of our own conditioning to a much bigger world; the great and real one of sorrow and joy, the world that leaves nothing out and knows that in actual life, the life of liberation, nothing ever can be left out.

The more we open, the more we discover a freedom and a vastness beyond all changing conditions. In the vastness there is a seeing of oneself in a much greater context. We are at once as infinitesimal as a grain of sand on an endless beach and as boundless as the universe containing every sacred thing.