How can we stay connected?

Try this experiment....starting right now.....every time you encounter another human being, however familiar they are to you, register whether your knee-jerk response is predicated from experiencing how different you are from that other or from how you are viewing your similarities.....at the end of the day, tote up  your scores "samed-out" or "differed-up".....if you tend to respond to the other as different to yourself a lot more than  experiencing your mutuality, you may want to examine what factors motivate you to do this...same with the  samed-out  acts......

Practices which encourage me to experience our mutuality rather than our differences tend to help me stay connected to all you others as a rule....many Buddhist meditations tend to emphasise the cultivation of our mutual nature and interdependence.....

Another practice I use with increasing frequency is meditating upon death...as Jack Kornfield writes, on one's deathbed, the question one asks is not "Kow much did I earn?" but "How well did I love?"....and when I think about all the mistakes I have made on that score through defensive indifference and withdrawal, I am more motivated to cut through what remains of crap when it comes to reaching out to others.

This impulse towards experiencing mutuality rather than difference in the initial encounter....it can be cultivated.......and I think this connects us more potently than need or ideology....without the familiar familial recognition...we is all cousins at play on the family Yggdresil....then attempts to build bridges to one another get washed away by the streams of paranoia, mistrust and selfgain.

Thanx for the question Siona.

Jon x