Look deeply within each person you encounter, no matter how brilliant or dull, refined or crude, righteous or wicked you judge this person to be.
Beyond their clothes, beyond their skin, beyond their behavior, beyond their words.
Beyond the emotions they show, the personality in which they dress, past whatever masks they don to conceal their inner woes.
Look deeply and see the vicious war each one fights inside, the battle to remain human in a maddening world—a world you will never know, for no two of us are placed in the same world and no two of us confront the same challenges—
—the sickness at knowing one’s own failures and deficiencies, the yearning to be more, the disappointment at not being that, the struggle to fight every sorrow, every pain, every plummeting, disastrous trauma of life…
True, perhaps not everyone fights every battle. Some have long surrendered.
But the very fact that this person was assigned this battle tells us more than can be spoken, for the One who created him knows he has the power to prevail and win.
That alone is enough to admire, and to be humbled, asking yourself, “Do I fight a battle nearly as fierce as the one I expect this person to win? In what way am I any better?”
Outer Perspective:
If you can develop some awareness of inner stillness, the outer perspective will have less control as your mind agitations subside. And without these agitations you will never have a need to reach for anything outer...
If you're always seeing life from the outer perspective of what the eyes see, those things will be judged accordingly and what's going on beneath the outer will not be noticed. Although with an outer minded perspective life still goes on, but it's very limited almost to the point of being delusional; I say this because it's how I lived for forty nine years and it caused my life to be a constant struggle. The constant struggle was self created and controlled by the outer perspective, although this wasn't understood at the time. An outer perspective life is one where there is constant needing which is caused by the mind agitations that aren't seen. This is why someone will reach for anything without giving it much thought regardless if it's beneficial or not. In that moment the Conditioned Mind deems it beneficial, but this is a big fat lie.
The outer perspective will only be noticed when the Conditioned Mind stops its incessant busyness. One will have to be able to just be for the busyness to subside; you will not see the essence of the forest from the trees if the mind is busy being focused on the trees. This outer perspective is strictly mind based. Hence the reason it's not conducive to one's well being is it's unstable as there are so many things outer to see, one right after another. This is why the big fat lie is in the forefront of most lives and stillness takes a back seat. If you can develop some awareness of inner stillness, less and less the outer perspective will be in control because the mind agitations will subside. It will be at this point that the need to reach outside for something will be lessened; it's probably the first time in your life that this has happened...
