Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
- Rumi
I think this is so important I decided to dedicate a whole blog to it. What is that field? Where is it? I don’t know.
I believe in a sense that there is a right and wrong, as we all have our own interpretation of reality based on what we have been through and how our biological make-up looks. We like different smells, tastes, sounds and what have you. What feels right to you, may feel wrong to me. Does that make it right or wrong though or is there an ultimate truth beyond our senses? I believe in an ultimate truth, or I think I do…but I also appreciate individual experiences. An apple is an apple, but we experience it differently through our senses.
I once at a rather young age had the epiphany that what I had been taught looks like blue may not look like blue to others as we don’t know what it looks like to them. I know it’s blue because that’s what I’ve been told and all the blues are the same nuance, but for all that I know to you they may look like what I see when I see the color green (this may not scientifically be true as we may be able to know this somehow, but there might still be a slight difference in how we perceive colors). I.e. our senses may vary (the thing itself doesn’t vary…but maybe it does according to quantum physics???) and my epiphany wasn’t really about just the color blue, it was about all things perceived through our senses. If you think about it – many things to us are very different to what other animals perceive them as. Animals with good hearing can hear sounds that sound like silence to you.
I also believe there are some things that are wrong in the sense that they inflict harm on others. At the same time I believe there is no right and wrong for the same reason as we are individuals with a different sense of perceiving the world. Whereas I think it wrong to kill a man, a wolf will consider a man food and see it as right to kill the man, just as the hunter consider it right to kill a wolf.
And then, beyond all that, I think there is love and if you live attuned to that, that’s a place where all is allowed as all actions will spring from love and thereby serve the world at large. A place where there is no judgment, as all is good. Where the neighbors will not pick on what colors you choose to paint your walls in, or how you live your life in general, because that’s of no importance. The only thing of importance is you living in love. I believe it is this field that sprung to mind when I read the words – a society free of judgment of things that are of no importance. For me societal pressure, or “judgment,” has bugged me many times and still does. A society that I myself judge as many times being “wrong.”He who hath notsinned cast the first stone…
I guess for me, freedom would be to act in accordance with my heart and having everyone else act in accordance with their hearts, without judging each other.
When I hear the words by Rumi I simply imagine myself next to someone, on a field, exploring life. Where there is no right, or wrong, only truth, life, love and exploration…maybe even naked exploration…
