Excerpted from a wonderful meditation by Mushin Schilling in the Spring/Summer issue of Kosmos Journal:

“Sharing is natural and it does have direction. But before this becomes a naturally dominant part of our culture, we might first have to let go of the Cartesian myth. We might need to see through the erroneous belief that objects do exist as such, the misleading notion that reality is based on truth and that knowing it is sufficient. Here is the sum of our confusion, cogito ergo sum, “I cogitate therefore I am.” This, of course, robs any non-cogitating entity of being, and as long as we consciously or subconsciously subscribe to this view, we are absolutely sure that when we look at an object, it doesn’t sense our presence. This conviction also tells us that ‘silver’ hours and a sea-changing sharing at the beginning of our life are merely epiphenomena of neo-cortextualized flesh, a hallucination with a consequence at most, but not objectively real.

But we aren’t really blind. We haven’t lost our sight. We never really left the sharing-space. Even though we can lose our mind to empirical objectivity and cogitation as the only reality, our body always remains embedded in the subjective world. In the midst of this seemingly dead-matter world rushing through vast, dreadfully empty space, as soon as we look at something and allow this something or entity to presence itself to us we start a very different journey. We shift eventually from the imaginary objective world to natural inter-presence. Even if we’ve lived here only for a little while, it is groundingly obvious that all beings and even every thing is sharing its substance with all—that we are all substantially present to each other, not only in an abstract sense but in a very concrete, sensual way, as well.

From an ordinary perspective everything that seems to be an object really is a subject. It is the subjectivity of every so called object that is participating in the shared space that we usually call psychic or spiritual—the all-encompassing/all-pervading dimension of animate and inanimate matter,. When we allow the subjectivity (presence) of a thing to share itself with us we are being addressed by the spirit, the collective conscious or the individual psyche. When we share ourselves with a dimension intrinsic to the visible and tangible world, we address the very same ‘spirit.’ And the old dualism between subject and object, between spirit and matter, even between reality and imagination fades away. We may, as a metaphor, describe this presence-sharing subjectivity to a Cartesian as the bridge over the chasm that he senses connecting the spiritual, the psychic and matter. But from our trans-Cartesian perspective, sharing ourselves, or self-presencing, is a fundamental force of Kosmos, as is gravity to a Cartesian (to us gravity is the attraction between huge-bodied beings sharing themselves also with energetic tendrils of love).

For many of us, the Cartesian fallacy that is so deeply entrenched in our individual and the triumphant Western sub-conscious is falling away. And rather than ask for truth, knowledge, understanding and essential being with the perennial question, “What/who is this?”, we finally dare to ask the utterly subjective question, “How do we relate?” The first question puts us into separation- mode, as things and beings might relate in mathematical equations or conceptually, but never subject to subject, heart to heart, life-throb to life-throb, being to being, with feeling.

But once we experiment regularly with the question, “How do I relate right now?,” or ask, “Avoiding relationship with what is present?,” or demand, “Show me how you share yourself,” or do some similar exploration, World changes into a sharing-space that can exponentially thrive, and will thrive through the ministry of sharing ourselves with Her. Reflecting on what our interior practice reveals about our embeddedness and sharing that with friend seems to be required for the good life of the 21st Century.

Twelve years ago I was shaken to the core by an enlightenment that revealed being’s foundational truth to me. I was shattered for I could no longer avoid the obvious, “The universe doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. There is no given meaning at all.” Maybe this sounds depressing to you and looks like an ugly piece in the Existential Exhibition of Matter that our empirical scientists are priests to. And it is. But for me it has been key. I look back on that happening as an enlightenment in the true sense of the word. It took away an age-old burden, the search to discover the One and Only Truth, The Absolute and it set me free to just be with things and matters that do as they please; no longer did I require anything to make sense. I could finally relax. And as I relaxed more and more, all of a sudden my whole being opened to an even more fundamental reality, “Everything and every being celebrates their presence, no matter what.” Meaning is not required for the celebration of being here. Self-presence and celebration are one and the same.

All matter and every entity celebrates being here now, and continually shares this in self-disclosure. As humans, we’ve co-created countless cultural realms and intelligent images—by which I mean those appearances that look at us as much as we look at them—with which we relate in wholesome or lesser ways and which can cause wellbeing or malaise. To insist on objective reality— for beings, things and images and declare everything that doesn’t comply with this empirical order irrational, ignorant or obsolete —seems to be the modern disease. The medicine I recommend is to look with subjective rigor at everything that appears to us and see how it shares itself with us and how we share ourselves with it. This may, in time, upgrade the human operating system such that we can rediscover how much we actually love World and how much She loves us.”