Things Are Not What They Seem

image credit: Lachlan Hardy

A man was walking his dog and the dog got ahead of him and went out of sight. He soon saw a man looking very anxious approaching him. The man said, “Do you own a Rottweiler?” The dog owner said, “ yes.” The man said, “My Chihuahua just killed your dog.” The dog owner was incredulous and asked, “How can a Chihuahua kill a Rottweiler?” The man answered, “My Chihuahua got stuck in his throat.” It’s not how you would expect an encounter between a Rottweiler and a Chihuahua would turn out. That is the paradoxical nature of life.

In Shaivism, it is said that the one consciousness for its own entertainment, out of its own being, becomes the many, every sentient and insentient entity in the universe. This phenomenon is called the play of consciousness. Everything in this universe is consciousness, and the attributes of good, bad, ugly, high, low, etc. are our ego’s designation to distinguish ourselves as separate from each other. If this play of consciousness is true and even if it isn’t true it is a good philosophy to live life by: To see the interconnectedness of all of life, that we are basically all the same no matter what appearance or form we show up as. With this outlook on life, a whole lot of our problems such as low self-esteem, insecurity, religious and racial intolerance would be insubstantial or irrelevant.

In the famous line from the play, As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”, was Shakespeare alluding to this play of consciousness, that things are not what they seem, that we can live life without taking ourselves so seriously? This summer, I expanded our vegetable garden to maximize our food production and planted seeds in places that did not have the optimum growing conditions. When I fussed over the results, my husband would remind me that it was all just an experiment. This perspective made it so much more fun and I was able to accept failure with ease. This outlook that life is really just an experiment, that a lot of us are just making it up as we go along, really helps me to lighten up about a lot of things. I can be more forgiving of others and myself because nobody really knows, and a lot of us are acting as if we do. I myself like to take a stance of openness as I have seen my beliefs about life discredited many times. It makes me very uncomfortable when some people express their values as the truth, try to impose them on others or worse to punish others for their differences. I like to contemplate this line from the Upanishads, which goes something like this: Those who know don’t know. Those who don’t know, know.