Bram Levinson

When you look up into the immensity of the night sky filled with stars, maybe a planet visible, what importance or meaning do you put there?

When you look at a happy, giggling baby, what do you see and feel?

When you look past the shore of an ocean out to the horizon where the sea meets the sky in an indistinguishable line of blues, what do you envision?

When you hear the chanting of Hindu sadhus, of Muslim imams reciting the Koran, of rabbis, cantors, priests, bishops and cardinals bellowing out prayers, what response do you observe in yourself?

When you walk through cemeteries or participate in the burial of a loved one, what significance or meaning do you put to the scenario?

We put whatever importance we want to any given moment in time, an importance that somehow fulfills a need in us. A need to defend our beliefs, to change or alter them, to lay them to rest and to adopt new ones. But we see and interpret what we want to. The world as you know it is a construct of your own mind.

Consequently, whatever you fear is in large part a construct of your mind. It is adaptable to change, as adaptable as it was when that fear first landed into a mind that had not associated fear with that particular experience or stimulus. You want change? Then look at your situation differently.

You can look at the night sky in all its splendor and see the impossibility of infinity and oblivion, randomness and chaos just waiting to swallow up this earth and all its inhabitants, or you can see the miracle of what we can barely grasp and the beauty of that not-knowingness.

You can look at a smiling, gurgling baby and feel the fear of the responsibility associated to ensuring the well-being of something so helpless and vulnerable, or you can see the possibilities associated to this beautiful bundle of joy and its potential to grow, learn, lead and inspire us all.

You can experience a funeral ceremony as the grief-drenched ending of the beauty your relationship with the deceased has been, or you can see it as the transformation of what was into what is, with the excitement of seeing what will follow, as no cycle ends without another one beginning, holding the promise of beauty to come.

This entire dream of “life” is just that, a dream. If you don’t like the dream you’re dreaming, change the filter you’re seeing it through. All you need is the knowledge that you have always been able to do it, but you were never told. I’m telling you. Now you know.

2 Responses

  1. Merci Bram pour ce texte inspirant qui ouvre nos horizons. Un rappel que nous avons la responsabilité première de changer notre regard sur la vie, les situations, les gens. Bien souvent, en changeant l’angle de notre regard, on change inévitablement nos pensées, puis notre attitude.
    Namasté Bram.

  2. Thank you for this reminder, Bram. There is so much we project onto the world around us. It all starts with awareness of the fact we are doing this. From there, our concepts start to lose their solidity. In a world with so much in the way of hard beliefs, this is important work. Greetings from Berlin!

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