“Accepting” or “Open?” Which?

There is a great deal of weight given these days to “being open.” To be accepting of things because it speaks well of me to others.  However, what does it matter what others think if all you accomplish is grey-scaling the full color brilliance of all the real world around you? It would seem to me that “accepting” and “open” are no longer compatible terms if you place them both into that one context.  Let me illustrate that…

So, what does it mean to be open to something?  Does that mean that I do not have my own belief system?  Does it mean that I must be politically correct and see everything in a grey scale without absolutes — right and wrong? Just because someone else does a thing and considers it acceptable does not mean that must be accepting of that practice.  If all being open really means is that there really aren’t any real rules or boundaries, then it sounds more like anarchy to me than openness.

Being open to things is about seeing—seeing things in their wholeness, which can only be done through your own lens; placed in the context of your own perceptions, experiences and reality. Openness does imply at all that you don’t have beliefs or that you know right from wrong or that you must be accepting of everything to remain politically correct which is unfortunately usually more about how you are perceived than how you perceive.  It is about removing “victimness” or the concept that things happen to me rather than around me. Furthermore, any ideas of entitlement or endowment.  You are not owed anything and even if you were, there is no cosmic court that will find in your favor and grant you a finding.

It’s about accepting responsibility for how you relate to things rather than how things relate to you and hoping to achieve some otherness than what you truly are; not aiming for some preconceived results or contrived outcome. Once you truly see a thing for what it is and are open to the reality of that thing, the rest follows. You don’t need to, nor is it productive, to push against things you do not control, because you are just one player on the stage.  You are not the play. What you truly are is already alive and living within you.  When we learn how to say yes to our real “selfness,” we are better situated to include both the good and the bad of everything else, including our true self.

Openness provides a very different place to stand and see “the truth.” Openness is immense and vast – so much so that when life itself is fully open, it is at one with the opposite of itself; death. What we really are, beyond the clay jar we’ve been given for the here and now. Only then can we understand that we truly do not end once the jar is broken. This is true of the here and now, the physical world we all live in, as well as what comes next; the spiritual world to which we go.