Emotional Healing through Mindfulness Meditation by Barbara Miller Fishman Ph.D

Author:Barbara Miller Fishman, Ph.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2012-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.

To hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.

—WILLIAM BLAKE

STRETCHING MIND TO ITS OUTER LIMITS

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Shakespeare wrote about four hundred years ago. His admonishment is still relevant today; our commitment to everyday reality causes us to miss much of what goes on in the world around us. It’s not as though we don’t know there’s a lot of “stuff” out there we cannot directly sense; we understand that waves of sound and light energy come in frequencies we cannot see or hear. We know DNA exists in every single cell of every living being on this earth, even though it’s too small for most of us to see or touch. And we don’t say scientists are irrational when they hypothesize that there’s a black hole within our Milky Way that can’t be seen but has a mass that is millions of times the mass of our sun. It’s supposed to be the gravitational core of our galaxy, keeping objects, including our sun and its planets, from flying apart. Nor do we blink when scientists suggest that the subatomic particle called a neutrino has the capacity to move directly through material objects, much like a ghost through a door. There are things in the world that go against our common understanding. And still we hold on to the idea that only what we can see and touch exists.1

Our physical world is also constantly changing. Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding in some places and contracting in others. Suns burn out; galaxies are born and die. Given astronomical time, the sky is in constant flux. Given geological time, mountains rise and fall. Given human time, cultures appear and disappear.

Our social world is also impermanent. What we call reality actually is a perspective that shifts from person to person. Listen to two people describe the same car accident, or the same marital conflict, and it’s soon apparent that interpretations of reality vary between people and over time. We see through the filter of our particular interpretive capacity.

Even the reliability of written history is uncertain. Deconstructionists (a group of contemporary philosophers) point out that the events historians write about, and the people they identify as key actors in those events, are chosen because of biases.2 For example, males have played major roles in almost all historical accounts, and of course most historians have also been male. In recent years, however, more women have begun writing history, so history itself is changing; now the role of women in creating culture is being highlighted. Histories now include accounts of women’s work, including planting, cooking, and child-rearing. But these accounts are also biased. Every single filter available to us, including Nancy’s, is a bias, a perspective. And they’re all true, in the sense that they bring to light another slice of this very complex world we live in.

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