Close your eyes for a moment and imagine that you had been born blind.   What would be your frame of reference to describe the color red, the concept of beautiful, the shape of a horse, a stunning sunset or the perfect body?   How would you define characteristics like handsome, pretty, pleasing or unsightly?  Your standards would be based on nothing more than what you feel from being in the presence of another.  You might use your hands and your sense of taste and smell to reinforce what you already know to be true based on those feelings.  The validation of your senses emanates from the feelings in your heart.   Throw away your glasses and listen to it. 

The only radar you can really trust is your heart, especially if you are sightless.  Your fingers are the instruments by which it receives the physical message and sends it off to the brain to processes this information.  A blind person won’t judge you for your thinning hair or taste in fashion.  A blind person won’t make a judgment about you before you’ve ever spoken based on the color of your skin or the scars on it.  A blind person won’t deem you unsuitable or incompatible because of your size or girth or physical disability.  A blind person will see you for who and not what you are.  Maybe you’re afraid to get close enough to find out just WHO that might be.  And you still think the person with the cane has the handicap?

                    Your perception can change rather quickly if you have eyes with which to see, but apparently we’ve all been looking at the wrong pictures.   After being accosted all day by images on television, in magazines and on  billboards, we come home with a twisted concept of what we should look like and the revelation that we somehow don’t measure up.   Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but I bet you that the scales of justice would balance differently if we saw each other only through our hearts and not our eyes.   There must be a reason that the centers of them are called pupils.  They’re just poor students.  It’s about time we learned a thing or two.

 With your eyes still shut, take your hands and cover your ears.  Imagine that along with being blind, you had also been born deaf.  Not a sound in the world could frighten or destroy your perception of it.  A parent’s voice couldn’t tell you who or what you are, should be, must think, like or do.  No one would tell you to laugh softer or love less.  Words could never provoke, persuade, convince, damage or hurt you.   If you  could no longer communicate with words, what would be your weapons?  To what end and why would you use them?

Imagine every story you were ever told is not filed in your memory or controlling the decisions and actions that you make today.  Imagine no one ever told you that you can’t, shouldn’t, aren’t, will never be.  Think about everything you accept as truth today because long ago someone else forced you to believe it by saying it was so or pierced your heart so deeply that you are still bleeding.  Try to remember where your ideas and beliefs came from and ask yourself if you believe them because they are true or if they are true because someone made you believe them. 

Were you raised in a house that was Godless or full of God?  Do you hate blacks or whites, Jews or gentiles, republicans or democrats, Arabs or Americans, linoleum or hardwood floors, Hellman's or Miracle Whip?  Who is responsible for you believing you should hate a person, a thing or a group of them at all?   You didn’t wake up one morning and decide that something or someone different than yourself was ruining the world and worth discarding, ignoring, destroying or hating.  Someone or something prompted you and taught you to believe it.  As time passed, you sought out the experiences that sustained those ideas and gathered them like soldiers to act as reinforcements.   It doesn’t take a lot of brains to become a valedictorian of ignorance.  All it requires is a controlled classroom and a charismatic teacher.

I can’t expunge what has been written on the blackboard of your life or mine.  But I can ask you to take a look at who was holding the chalk.  And then I’ll ask you to take that chalk away and start thinking for yourself.  You might want to go ahead and invest in an eraser too.  Seek your truth but remember that everybody else’s perception of it comes from their own vast or limited experiences.  It doesn’t make you or anyone else more right or wrong.  It just makes them what they are.  Open your heart to that possibility.

 Nothing is written in stone unless the heart from which words are formed or the recipient for whom they were intended  are made of it. 

 I ask you again to close your eyes and cover your ears, without sight or sound to influence you.  No vision or hearing imparting or impairing your perspective.  No directors to answer to, no lines to memorize, no script to follow.  Rewind the movie of your life and go back to the point where there was nothing but a fresh roll of film waiting in the camera to start documenting your existence before you were exposed to everything and everyone else.  For nine months inside your mother’s womb you were exactly this being, this soul.  You were you in your purest state, nothing more than a tiny labor of love waiting to happen.

And then you were born.