When you experience another in the space prior to their closely held beliefs, when they abandon their identity if even for a moment and expose their vulnerability, you are blessed with delicious wonder, the taste of sweet humanity. That simple beauty pales in comparison to that which is the actuality of all beings.

Normally we meet another’s hardened beliefs, not who they are under them, not even the person just like us who has hopes and fears, vulnerabilities and strengths, not the one who smiles and cries, who hurts and loves, who desires to be seen and heard, who feels unworthy, who is doing the best they can.

When their inflexibility grates against ours we automatically create a picture of them, and react to that picture, and at that point it becomes impossible to actually engage with them. The picture and the reaction meet, not two humans in all of their precious humanness. The picture steers us away, skirting around the inherent promise, erasing their humanness in our minds. To all extents and purposes, we kill them, for they are dead to us.

That other never can change, regardless of what they do, what they learn, the experiences they have that cannot but alter who they are. They are stuck like a fly in amber in that moment in time when the picture was drawn — freeze framed.

Until we notice what we’ve created, we are condemned to a world where slivers of it, perhaps even large chunks, are dead to us, are no longer accessible. That would be bad enough, but that is not the total of the damage. Beyond the separation it creates, something most are not concerned with, it leaves the body in pieces, the whole of us ripped asunder.

We are not two. There is not them and us.

Whether we grok this ‘not two stuff’ or not, whether we see the actuality of life as it really is, as we really are, we feel the severing, we feel the knots in our guts, the hardening of the heart, the mind snapping shut.

Is there any surprise that we are a sick society, that our guts are inflamed, our hearts attack us, our minds simply shut down, that we can’t sleep in the turmoil of all that we reject?

All that we reject is This, is Us, is infinite aliveness itself. Our rejection maintains the pictures that stick and stay. What would it mean to meet another as an empty page, to let the moment inform us? What if we really don’t know what’s going to happen next or how another will behave? Can you let life unfold as it will, and see?

Right now, I can think of one or two people that I have dehumanized, that I have concretized in time, at least a bit. How about you?