Do you see blue? How about red? Can you see yellow? Can you tell the difference?

A very small percentage of the human population is colorblind. If it was 100%, people would say that there is no such thing as blue, or red, or yellow. Only shades of grey would be considered "real."

## In This World

<br>Now in this world this is not the case. Most people do see color. But there are other types of perception beyond sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. It's just that even a smaller percentage of people have access to this.

There was a time when I touched the shoe of an enlightened person who had been dead 12 years at that point. The next thing I knew something ran up my arm, entered my heart, and I was dancing across the floor! 

Within days I developed many new abilities to perceive, including the ability to communicate with trees, each of which is self-aware and "thinks" and "feels" in a tree manner of doing so. All the different siddhis I developed lasted only 3 weeks, but what a 3 weeks it was! 

Even after I lost the consistent access to those abilities, parts of them would spontaneously come back from time to time. That is how I came to know the distress the plant life feels when it is having parts cut off it. 

Everything is self-aware and nothing wants to be cut or killed. And yet we all die. You and I are being eaten right now. Life is always eating life in order to live. This is inescapable, as the Buddha once discovered, unless we wish to commit violence against ourselves to accelerate the ending of our own lives.

## Can't Unknow

<br>Once you know that blue exists, even if you can't see it anymore, you can no longer deny that blue is real. 

People can present you with all kinds of theories about how blue can't possibly be real. There is no scientific proof that can be found in a colorblind world for the existence of blue. There is simply nothing and no one who can measure the verification end of things. Even instruments that pick up the different wavelengths of colors can't help, because the person interpreting the wavelengths still can't translate any of them as "blue."

> In the same way, realize how much your beliefs have been putting a colorblind filter on your life experience.

<br>Before I touched that shoe, I had no idea trees were individuals, or that different families of trees had different personality signatures, sort of how dogs differ in nature from cats. You know what personality traits you think of when you think of dogs vs cats. In the same way, there are different personality traits of Pines vs. Oaks.

That information has always been available to me, but I was filtering it out most of my life. And even still, my ability to let it in is greatly diminished compared to during that 3 weeks. 

So ask yourself this unanswerable question, simply to stimulate reflection:

#### What is your belief filtering out of your life experience?

<br>What is there that you aren't allowing yourself to know is there?

Are you willing to perceive more?

Then, are you willing to live as if you know what you now know, even if everyone around you is living "colorblind?"

![alone-971122_1280.jpg](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmVx1PumGiiBj8oAgpbzALMjw5ZX7Az7m2bcsoxajXexmL)

*[Source](https://pixabay.com/en/alone-bandeau-beauty-blind-971122/)*