Adyashanti recounts a small scene in a doctor's office to illustrate how the same event can be a problem from one perspective and entirely neutral from another. He uses the contrast as a pointer to the shift in standpoint that underlies awakening.
Transcript
It's very amazing, very interesting to me to see this difference of perspective as I was sitting there and they're kind of wrapping my hand and I'm looking around the room looking at what's happening with other people. And once again, it was just such a a sort of vivid reminder that everything just depends on perspective. So the people that were getting cast put on, they had one perspective. Most of them, their perspective was, we could say, limited, which is this is a problem. Right? It's easy to actually think it's a problem when you're having a cast put on or you're undergoing some sort of surgery or whatever. And yet, from the doctor's point of view, there's no problem. They're not really looking at people from a standpoint of problem. They're looking from a totally different standpoint. Of course, they're they're the caregivers and they've got their job to do. And of course, they're not the one with a broken whatever. And yet very interesting to see that the only thing that had the power to cause most the people in there to suffer, most of the people that I saw weren't suffering pain. They were suffering fear. They were afraid, which is kind of natural, I guess you'd say. And yet the power of the perspective was starkly obvious. that there was simply a perspective that of fear or that there was a problem. And so those who didn't share that perspective, they were just going about doing whatever they had to do. And those that shared the perspective that there was something to be afraid of or that there was a problem, then they had their own perspective. And it was very interesting to always see that when people had the sense that they were having a problem, their perspective was very narrow, was very, very limited. It was like if they walked in the room and they had a cast on their hand, their whole world was about the cast on their hand or the cast on their foot or the cast on whatever that their whole perspective of narrowed down unto this one thing. And for people who didn't have things on their hands or their feet or whatever, their perspective wasn't narrowed down. So it was still quite open. Which means that what the people had, these two people had very different perceptions of what was happening. And so as I was sitting there, sat sitting there on one of those, you know, those beds, they give you those hospital beds. And then I was, of course, I was sitting on the end of it so they could wrap my hand up. As I was looking around the room, I became very conscious, very aware that this was actually what was happening. And actually, because I've talked about it before, the I don't necessarily like being in hospitals, but I find them very very interesting places to be because they're just like condensed forms of humanity. Do you know? There's the helpers, there's the herders, there's the sick, there's the healthy, there's the there's the wise doctors, there's the people who think they don't know anything. You know, there's love, there's anxiety, there's everything you can imagine. actually just you know walk down the hallway and uh it's all happening and so actually whenever I find myself in a hospital I'm always sort of morbidly interested fascinated by what happens. And so as I was sitting there, I guess it was just yesterday, they put a new cast on because the first cast wasn't working out too well. And uh noticing that people were actually creating their experience and their the creation of their experience was completely dependent on their perspective. Where their mind chose to be and what their mind chose to tell it tell them would totally determine their perspective. How they were feeling, what they were thinking, their relationship with what was happening. There's a few people I saw that came in the few times that I was there that were relatively seemed pretty happy. And everybody that I saw that was happy, the interesting thing was their perspective hadn't narrowed. It hadn't narrowed on to their injury. Everybody that I saw that was happy, their their perspective hadn't narrowed on to their injury. And all those that I saw that were unhappy, their their perspective had narrowed onto their their injury. And I thought, isn't that just how life is? You couldn't have sort of a better metaphor for awakening because it's all about perspective. Awakening's all about perspective. Life itself is all about perspective.