by Brian Tom O’Connor
Consider the game of Monopoly. There is a two-dimensional board on which squares have been drawn separating them one from the other. By mutual agreement (the rules and our willingness to follow them when playing with each other), we go along with the fiction that these squares represent real estate divisions, some of which are owned by one player and some of which are owned by others. In addition, we mutually agree that our movement among these imaginary pieces of real estate is constrained by the random roll of a pair of dice. We also agree that little colored pieces of paper define our ability to buy, sell, and improve our fictional real estate properties. Finally, we agree that our movement is dictated by the order in which we sit around the board.
In other words, we voluntarily allow limitations to be imposed where none exist. Limitations on ownership, limitations on mobility, limitations on resources, and limitations on our freedom of action.
However, in reality, these limitations don't exist! The real estate divisions are simply colored ink on cardboard. We have the physical freedom to move our little tokens anywhere around the board—or anywhere else in the room—that we please. Our buying power is just bits of colored paper with numbers printed on them. We can get up and walk around the room any time we please. When we go to the kitchen to get a beer, the limitations of the Monopoly board don't apply.
If we apply this metaphor in the spirit of playfulness appropriate to its nature as a game, we can use it to gain insight into the nature of absolute reality.
All reality is simply energy temporarily appearing in different forms. It appears that we are limited to our physical bodies, and all other people and animals are limited to theirs. But when we imagine that all experience appears in the one unified field of awareness, and that in fact, no experience (including objects of perception) can appear outside of awareness, we realize that all experience is made of awareness. And awareness is one indivisible unlimited field.
So, all the apparent limitations that we see and sense in the physical world have no more reality than the mutually agreed upon rules of a Monopoly game.
As always, you don't need to believe any of this is true, you simply have to play with the idea. That's enough to point your mind in the direction of the unlimited field of awareness.
Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash