Look outside your window. What is out there?
Trees, cars, roads, streams, people.
I’m sure there are other things that you named, but I would doubt many of you thought to yourself, the one commonality of everyone reading the blog, and the biggest thing that is out there.
Air.
Why is this? Well, the obvious answer is that we don’t think of air, since it is invisible. However, I think it is more subtle than that.
The real reason is that air in (to our mind) unbounded – due to the fact that it is invisible, and therefore not an object that we think of.
Taking this idea to the next level, is the fact that we like to objectify our world. It gives us a handle with which to manipulate our thoughts – and sits at a more basic level of understanding, before abstract thought.
Every object in our world becomes connected with it’s descriptive attributes in our mind, and thereby turned into a manipulative object – also known as a noun. It is with these nouns that we explain our world and our place in it.
Therein lies the issue.
When we define something it, makes it black and white, and often the reality lies somewhere in the shade of gray. Our mind doesn’t like gray, so we choose a side, and end up on one extreme or the other.
The problem is that since we really are existing somewhere on the continuem, the fact that we choose an extreme to explain our reality, doesn’t actually sit that well with us – and we feel off balance.
To find balance, we need to reject our object model, and instead find our balance point. For without this skill, we can never find “emotional alignment.”