Reality can only express itself in first-person experience, from a single and unique point of view. All things require a point of view in order to be anything at all, and all points of view have a unique observing being at their center.
A momentary event observed by a woman stepping out of her luxury SUV can look quite different to a man sitting on the curb on the other side of the street and holding a hand-drawn cardboard sign that pleads for a meager contribution, and different still to the raggedy dog lying on the sidewalk next to him—to the point of whether what is observed by any of them counts as an event at all, and if it is an event, where its boundaries lie.
At any given moment, there are an unimaginable number of living beings experiencing the world, each from a unique one-of-a-kind perspective. And none of these perspectives have any special claim on the reality of that moment. Or, conversely, all of these perspectives have a special claim, which comes to the same thing.
To understand the world for what it actually is in itself, you would need somehow to stitch all of these unique, individual, momentary perspectives together into a single inclusive tapestry, a single viewpoint. And even this composite viewpoint would not yield a comprehensive weave: its very nature as a point of view means that something is being left out.
There is a deep and abiding humility that goes along with this, with awareness that what is true for you is only true for you, and, even then, it is only true for you now, for the moment. There is humility in knowing that your transient perspective is not part of some universal point of view, and that a grasshopper’s experience is as legitimate as your own.
