Vachon Imagined

When people perceive another as hating them, they are first having an experience within awareness.

Only afterward does the mind place that experience upon an object.

Someone disagrees with your lifestyle.

Your message.

Your choices.

Perhaps even your very existence.

Something powerful arises.

The body feels it.

The heart recognizes it before the mind names it.

Then awareness becomes a word.

“Hate.”

And almost immediately the mind asks,

Who is doing this to me?

What is felt begins to appear as fact.

What is fluid becomes solid.

What is movement becomes identity.

Because the body cannot easily contain the intensity of such an experience, the mind seeks somewhere to place it.

It places it upon a person.

A family.

A nation.

A stranger.

A dog.

Nature itself.

The object is almost irrelevant.

What matters is that awareness has now been attached to form.

The same movement happens with every experience.

Joy.

Praise.

Fear.

Shame.

Love.

We rarely notice awareness itself.

We notice what we have attached it to.

A disciplined mind does something different.

It allows the experience.

It feels its movement completely.

But it does not claim ownership of it.

No one owns awareness.

We participate in it.

We witness it.

We move through it.

What we call “hate” may simply be life moving with such force that the body cannot yet understand how to contain it.

So we discipline the mind.

Not to suppress experience,

but to remain present with it.

Like an eagle that fixes its attention with extraordinary precision and then releases it,

the disciplined mind gives its full attention,

and then lets it go.

It does not deny.

It does not explain.

It does not cling.

It sees.

It allows.

It releases.

Nothing is preserved except awareness itself.

And awareness was never asking to become an object.

It was only asking to be seen.