You feel emotions with your body. A trauma is a blow. You are laid low. You have the wind knocked out of your sails. You are red hot with anger, or your anger seethes, or you are blinded by it. You are giddy with joy and electrified with excitement. Laughter expands your ribs, and joy expands your heart. You feel thrills and chills. You feel emotions physically, and you already know which ones encourage health.
The mind, which is so often quick to censor, immediately translates its perception of events, however, and sends the resulting tally directly into your bloodstream. From the mind's recognition arises emotion.
The mind throws caution to the winds and sends you emotions in a reckless fashion. This is one time when the mind does not discriminate. It hands you emotions right away. Certainly, it may tell you that one emotion is good while another isn't, but the mind already gave you the whole package. It didn't tell you the whole story, however, and it didn't take responsibility. In one breath the mind may tell you it is the better part of valor to bury an emotion, and in the next breath, it tells you that would be unwise. All the while, it is the mind that interpreted events into the emotions it threw at you.
You have had concrete experiences where you misunderstood an occurrence. Perhaps you thought you were being snubbed, hadn't realized that the offender wasn't wearing his glasses and didn't see you, or had been through some trauma himself which left him unseeing. When the mind understands, it takes no offense. Do you agree that the mind triggers emotion?
Even when an offense is intended, you don't have to accept it as it was given. Even when someone is deliberately hurtful to you, you can choose to see that he is nevertheless blind or deaf, or if not blind nor deaf, then he simply sees or hears differently from you. When two people do not see eye to eye, what is so terrible? Must more be made of it than that?
When you are working toward a common goal, and there is disagreement, sit down together for the purpose of understanding the other's vision. He does not yet have yours, nor do you have his, but right now you are trying to see through his eyes. Later he will want to see through yours.
We are not talking about two sides. We are not talking about a competition where one wins and another loses. We are talking about communication from which understanding grows. From openness, understanding and collaboration arise. From collaboration may come a new rainbow, perhaps never heralded before.
In any case, invite someone who sees differently from you to sit down with you. This is an invitation to exceed limits. Lack of agreement is no more than limitation. When you sit down with someone, you are silently agreeing to melt impasses and, in so doing, freeing each other to swim across a lovely ocean with broader strokes.
Lose no opportunity to meet with another and look into their eyes. Within their eyes is the ocean you are crossing. In this way, you put every man before you, and eyes are opened so that the swimming is magnificent. Your eyes are opened, and two oceans join in a Oneness in which illusion cannot remain.
Anything but this Oneness is illusion. Apartness from anyone never was. Only perceived. Only mistaken. Only uncalled for.
Now, come. Shake hands. Embrace the world. It has waited so long for you to bring peace to it.