There’s a little story about two young fishes swimming along when they meet a older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a while and eventually one turns to the other and asks, “What the heck is water?”.
The point of this story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. This may seem a banal platitude, but the fact is that in our day-to-day living, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance.
Most of the stuff that we tend to be automatically sure of turns out to be totally wrong and deluded. For example, everything in our own immediate experience supports the belief that we are the ‘centre of the universe’: it’s our world right there in front of us. We rarely talk about this sort of natural self-centredness, because it’s so socially unacceptable. It is however, our default setting; the fundamental wiring of our brains from birth. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you in some way, but our own immediate experience is so real!
Somehow we need to alter or free ourselves from this natural default setting and see and interpret everything through the our Self.
Our common problem is a tendency to over-intellectualize: to get lost inside our mind and become ‘blind’ what is right in front of us. We have become unconscious to reality. When our mind dominates it becomes a terrible master while it should be an excellent slave.
Perhaps some examples from our everyday lives may drive home this point. We go to the supermarket; its crowded with mums and pushchairs and their children on school holidays. Our irritation starts to rise. We then get to checkout and despite cruising down all the lines, there are long queues at them all. Eventually we get to checkout and encounter the fastest checkout lady who builds a mountain from your groceries at the end of the till. Struggling to pack it all you drop your credit card so become flustered and forget your pin number! Now we are really frustrated and we’ve not yet got to the car park. On the way home someone pulls out in front of you causing you to brake hard and you hear all the groceries roll off the back seat onto the floor. Now you’re really upset and miserable.
This has been your experience of your world on this day: your water. Let's not think that this water is the same for us all. Recent violent disturbances show how very very different the 'water' can be.
But you can choose to change this. On a practical level, did you really need to go to the supermarket at that time, could you have avoided the crush, or were you only following your habit? The real change however, is to alter our awareness; to be become conscious in those moments. In the queue we have been given time to think differently, to raise our awareness. The checkout lady is only doing her job and trying hard to clear the queues, the mums may not be able to afford after-school childcare, the inconsiderate driver may be rushing to sick relative’s bedside. Who knows, but that is their worlds.
We are naturally selfish, but we can become Self-centred using the lens of our Real Self to view our world. This is what Jesus meant by métanoïa , to change our knowing. [logion 28]