Being alive

Imagine you are wearing color tinted glasses as you go about your daily activities. Everything you see will look different than the actual color of the objects. What you experience will not be the real color of the objects you see since everything will be filtered through these colored glasses. Now imagine that someone had put these colored glasses on you when you were a child and you have been wearing these glasses for as long as you remember and have not really experienced the world without them. You don't even know, you don't even realize, you are not even aware that you are wearing these glasses - you think that what you see is the real color of the objects.

Now imagine yourself arguing with others about the color of objects and being pretty sure about your own colors and perceptions. You can see how silly that is.

You probably guessed by now that the glasses we are talking about is our mind.

Continuing that example, if we really want to be alive and experience the true world what can we do? The first step would be to become aware of the glasses we are wearing and then realize that they are colored. Assuming that we cannot actually remove these glasses (since we cannot just cast off our mind!), the next obvious step would be to change the color of the glasses - make them colorless, remove the tint. Unfortunately it is not that simple! We really don't know what colorless really means - when we try to remove the tint, we might just be introducing a different colored tint in its place!

First things first though. Realization that our mind is colored, that it is prejudiced and opinionated, and that this affects our day to day actions, our life and how alive we are is the first step towards awareness.