There is no world. There is only your relationship with the world. Without you the world does not exist on its own. Your suffering is in your relationship. Not the world. If you give attention to your relationship, without the world in the picture for the moment, you are now relating to your relationship. Your relationship with the world is one, your relationship to that relationship is another altogether. When we give our attention to the way we relate with the world, the journey of awareness or mindfulness begins.
We begin to notice the dysfunctional pattern of that relationship. We don’t notice it in the beginning as our attention is towards the world, rather than towards our relationship with the world. Our ability to notice the way we relate with the world is the only intimate relationship we have with ourselves. We can be having a loving or hateful relationship outside of us, to mean the world, and we think those are the best or worst relationships we have ever had with the world; yet when we get closer to how we relate with the world, we will be amazed and surprised by the fact that there is truly no relationship with the world except the way we relate to it.
How we relate gives us the meaning of love or hate. It just ends there and has never gone out to the world. The world is only exactly reflecting this relationship and makes you think there is someone or something outside there to get, to reject, to have. It is a big delusion and madness of ignorance. As J puts it beautifully – nothing can be hidden unless you ignore it and what is seen cannot be hidden anymore.
Your relationship with the world is hidden from you simply because you are not observing the obvious except the look at the world without “your relationship” to it. When “your relationship” to it is not being taken notice, ignorance breeds like wild fire. You think there is something out there that you can be attached to or to resist, yet there is nothing except the way you relate to it. Thus the Buddha was wise when he pointed out that suffering is when you resist what you are getting and you want what you don’t get. The truth in this profound statement is not what you think it is, perceiving that what comes to you is what you have to accept since there is no way you can reject or resist it, though in the form level it seems to be true.
But the reality is that nothing actually comes to you. Do you say the floor comes to you? Do you say the garden comes to you? Nothing comes to you except your relationship to it. When you relate to it personally it seems like it is attacking you or defending you. That is what special relationship is all about. You don’t give special relationship to the road you travel on except the destination you are attending to – that is your special relationship; unless the road has a big pothole and you got into it. At that moment you have a special relationship to it and it can be hell! Otherwise, everything is merely passing by all the time. Hence you are merely a passerby if you wish to be happy. Otherwise when you give meaning to it, as in relating to it personally, you have to eat what you give to it.
Your relationship is where clinging occurs. Without that specialness, life is merely a show, a movie just as nature comes and goes. No right or wrong except what is being presented to you, like the roads, the trees, wind, house etc. Can you too relate it in this manner when you take notice of your relationship with the world? Your relationship with the world is just nature of the past doing its time again and again until you wakeup to it and no longer give it due power. Only then the world becomes your space of compassion, for love to exist, for peace to be experienced – all within, and without, the capsule of the mind.