Vachon Imagined

When people think of their neighbor, it often conjures a physical description of someone, something appearing within the mind. This is your neighbor, the dual nature of one mind that shrouds itself in judgment until the one appears.

This one is your own self. The self that people have given many names to throughout time, but it is simply the Self. It is yourself, the I, the awareness of the life within you and the life happening all around you.

It is the life before the filter, before all the things you were taught were not appropriate, before the ideas of who you should be and how you should appear. This is why it is often said that the way to the secret of life is becoming a child again.

It is the innocent view of life, the part of you that is comfortable in what it thinks because what it thinks is itself. Selfishness personified, but not in the objectified or harsh way we often judge it. It is the natural self, the unguarded self, the self before it learned to separate itself from what it sees.

Once we discover this “neighbor,” it becomes playful to love it. We become honest about the ways we objectify it, honest about the ways we criticize it, and honest about the ways we have unknowingly created distance from what was never separate.

It is as though what appeared to be two is revealed as one. Everything is simply happening, spontaneously, everywhere, for the one who becomes honest, accountable, and true to what they see.

True to what they are, happening in a time that is already over before it can be held as permanent.

Because life is never found in the thing we try to hold. It is found in the movement itself, in the arising and passing of each moment, before the mind reaches out to name it, possess it, or make it something it can keep.

This is why, when mystics spoke of loving your neighbor, they were not speaking only of another person. They were pointing toward the recognition of yourself. The neighbor was never separate from you. The one you encounter outside of yourself is the same life appearing through another form.

You can see this when you are at peace with life, when you are no longer arguing against what is happening. The separation begins to dissolve, not because the world changes, but because the mind no longer stands against it.

The neighbor is revealed as the self meeting itself everywhere, learning to love what it once judged, embracing what it once rejected, and resting in the simple truth of what already is.