Concepts

When perception is stronger than mindfulness, we recognize various appearances and create concepts such as "body," "cat", "house," or "person". . . On some clear night, go outside, look up at the sky, and see if you can find the Big Dipper. For most people that is a familiar constellation, easy to pick out from all the other stars. But is there really a Big Dipper up there in the sky? There is no Big Dipper up there. "Big Dipper" is a concept. Humans looked, saw a certain pattern, and then created a concept in our collective mind to describe it. That concept is useful because it helps us recognize the constellation. But it also has another, less useful effect. By creating the concept "Big Dipper" we separate out those stars from all the rest, and then, if we become attached to the idea of that separation, we lose the sense of the night sky's wholeness, its oneness. Does the separation actually exist in the sky? No. We created it through the use of a concept. Does anything change in the sky when we understand that there is no Big Dipper? No.

- Joseph Goldstein, Insight Meditation from Everyday Mind


Hmmmm, I wonder in what other areas of our lives do these concepts effect our experience? My feeling is that it happens in just about every facet of our lives. Our attachment to this partiality and our need to define everything is causing us to look at life (and ourselves) in a limited and fragmented way. I feel that this is limiting our potential experience of experience itself. We feel like these separate beings in "here" living in an alien world out "there,"  yet we are as much of a product of the universe as anything else that we observe from this side of our lens. Think about it. When do we actually make a decision that is completely untouched by our conditioning and these patterns that we refer to as self? These patterns are the result of billions of years of unfolding. When we let go of this concept of separate self and the identification that comes with it, something changes. We have the ability to see be the bigger picture. To me, this is what realization is, and the illusion is not that we don't also exist as separate beings, it's that we are exclusively identified with an existence that is a partial concept of what we really are. An amazing concept no doubt, just a limited one.