(Un)Subscribe

Every time I share content with Jordan Peterson the following week people unsubscribe from the Mindful Monday Mail. I’m aware that I’m assuming that the sometimes polarising and disagreeable content of Jordan is the reason for this trend. Who am I to jump to a conclusion? Maybe I’m just boring. If what he says is right or wrong is not what I’m after. I don’t agree with all of what he says. I’m just curious. If an opinion we don’t agree with makes us unable to listen to what an educated person has to share it makes me ponder about our lacking ability to listen openly to an opinion we don’t agree with.
As a society, we are increasingly unable to hold two vastly different topics in our awareness without judgment. Our mind wants to understand and is programmed to at all costs avoid the unknown and shy away from the reality of the present moment. When we are only able to listen to what we already know we aren’t able to learn something new. So, the real problem so many of us come up against in life is that too much of our time is spent generating theories about what is going on. We generate ideas about what the world is and who we are in this moment. “Today I'm happy, today I'm unhappy, today I'm fit, I am unfit, I am big, I am little, I am old, I'm young, I’m white or black,…” There is no shortage of the theories we generate about ourselves, others, and life itself. You could say this is what thinking is, it is creating theories and speculations about reality so that we can erase uncertainty. We describe other things by the labels we make for them and classify them by their function. Even the people closest to us get labeled. “My boyfriend, my wife, my best friend, my co-worker…” It is important to have labels to give the world around us a frame in which it can exist.
Yet this can lead to the reduction of the miracle of life. We reduce the miracle of a tree to the name assigned to that kind of tree or the use we have for it, unable to appreciate the sheer presence of the tree in and of itself. This process of reducing the immediate experience to our theories about results in separation of ourselves and the world around us. We cripple ourselves, unable to touch the reality of life and incapable of comprehending why we are not deeply connected with ourselves and others. We reduce anything to our theories about it, we cannot really appreciate what we hear, taste, smell, feel, and see so the magic of life is lost because we I've already chained ourselve up in our thoughts and opinions. When we are stuck in thought, confusion arises and suffering begins.
I don’t’ ask you to listen to Jordan Peterson, but to listen to yourself and notice when you judge or act without listening because you think you already know. Do you have a practice that helps you penetrate into the heart of reality? A practice that requires you to listen deeply, nurturing the ability to discern between truth and illusion.