When push comes to shove, there’s only one relationship that matters, because it defines all the others.
In fact, it’s the only relationship you’ll ever actually have – literally the only thing you get to experience, your entire life:
The past is made of Thought.
The future is made of Thought.
Your whole experience—right now—is made of Thought: the screen you’re reading this on, the surface your body is resting on, your body, even!
And other people. The experience you have of other people is made of Thought, too.
There are no other people!
This is the essence of the inside-out understanding, and it’s not controversial. It’s just the way it is.
These two statements are identical in what they mean; it’s just a different way of saying the exact same thing:
- You’re not living in the feeling of your circumstances, you’re living in the feeling of Thought in the moment
- There are no ‘other people’.
They’re the same because they both point to the (scientifically demonstrable) fact that we don’t get to experience an ‘outside world’ directly.
What we get is a Thought-created perceptual facsimile of that world.
And that’s all we get.
It looks amazing, it looks completely nailed on and true (it has to – we couldn’t function if we were second-guessing it all the time!) but it’s made of fluid, fallible, flighty Thought.
Now, before you rage quit this Daily Reminder because the Reader Ego Construct 📦 just can’t be doing with all this silliness, let me be clear about what I’m not saying.
Your experience of ‘other people’ is not real.
Of course it is!
There’s you and there’s me and here I am typing this Daily Reminder and there’s you reading it and we’re not ONE – we’re two different beings and we're both having totally different experiences of these words on the page and…
…oh, hang on…
How can my experience of it be true if yours is different?
🤔
Ah. Oh. Ummm…
Dammit, and I wrote the bloody thing!!
This is all that is meant by ‘there are no other people’ – not that they’re not there and you’re an idiot for thinking that they are, just that you don’t ever actually get to experience them.
What you actually get is an experience of your self (which is made of Thought), reflected outwards.
- They’re experiencing their ideas of themselves, and of you
- You’re experiencing your ideas of your self, and of them.
In fact, for clarity,
And yes, now my brain hurts, too.
😂
Let’s keep it simple. Here’s a quote I came across online, that I wish I’d come up with myself and am going to claim as my own, by altering it ever so slightly:
Changing your thoughts is nothing compared to changing your relationship to Thought.
Now that’s an idea worth sticking on the back burner for today.
💟
Giles