So what constitutes the world we live in is the concepts that develop little by little. They don’t exist in reality, they exist because we need them. We need to describe things in a certain way. We need to use things, to work with them, so we form concepts. Tables didn’t exist until people needed them, you see. “Table” is basically an idea. Before that, people sat on rocks. They put their food on a rock, until that wasn’t comfortable, and they made a flat rock. Later on it became a table. As tables came into being, the concept of table came into being. We can understand more easily that things created by human beings, like tables or airplanes or music or computers, did not exist before they were created as concepts in the mind. But it is much more difficult to see that our concept of star, for instance, actually creates the stars that we see, to see that before we discriminate them they don’t exist. It is normal to assume that the existence of the star is independent of our conceptualizing of it; we think we know that they existed before human beings existed. We think of the stars as separate, independent, but we can’t think of stars or recognize stars without the idea of stars. Without the idea we will see dots of light in the sky but we will not see stars. Without the notions of sky and stars, we will live in a world without stars or sky, a world with something above us that’s light and blue, sometimes gray, sometimes dark, and sometimes dark with little dots of light. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch. 2
The more fixed and rigid a concept is, the farther away it is from the living experience. Rigid concepts limit our inner experience, make our inner world smaller and smaller. They make our world in general smaller and more restricted. We are controlled by prejudices that we feel we need to uphold and fight for. – Diamond Heart Book Four, ch. 14
So what we call increasing knowledge is nothing but fixing the world, making it more rigid and making ourselves, our lives, increasingly fixed. Unchangeableness becomes our security then. To challenge the reality of these concepts makes us feel very insecure. It’s all right to arrange them in different juxtapositions, in different relationships and categories. In fact, this gives us more security. As the weaving of our concepts becomes thicker and denser, so the fabric of our world becomes even more set, which gives us a firmer sense of security. At the same time, we lose the dynamic quality of who we are, and of what the world is.
Our world loses dynamism and becomes more mechanical, and we become more mechanical. We are not just living in our minds, we are living our minds. We are not just living in the past, we are living the past. We are living the person we became as a child. We are living our parents’ daughter or son. We are living our idea of being a human being. We are not living in a house, we are living in our idea of a house. To be more precise, we are living the idea of a person living in the idea of a house. Our idea of a person is driving our idea of a car through our idea of city streets. The world we live in is old and dead. The freshness, the vitality, the spark is gone, because whenever you see something, you see it through the filter of a concept, and it has to fit a concept that you already know. So you never see it in its freshness. You look at the rug, and see red, blue and green already fixed. You already know what a rug is, you already know what red is, and what blue is. Nothing is new, these are just different arrangements. The more things are known, the more they are set, the more they lose the freshness, the dynamism, the brightness, the living quality. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, Ch. 12
Presence is the ultimate ground for confronting the judge because presence includes the knowledge that you exist without reference to any outside source. As long as you believe you need an image of yourself, a belief, an idea, or some information in your mind in order to exist, you will be at the mercy of the judge because it lives on ideas, beliefs, and images. However, the moment you recognize your own existence independent of any mental concept, the judge becomes simply words in your mind, no more significant than the label on your shirts or the length of your toenails. Labels and long toenails can be useful at certain moments and cause problems at others, but they have little relation to or impact on who you are and what it means to live your life. – Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within, Ch. 25