my versus our

According to Eckhardt Tolle, "the fundamental difference between an instinctive response and an emotion is this: An instinctive response is the body's direct response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is the body's response to a thought." So, if you accidentally touch a hot surface, you instinctively pull away. If someone shines a bright light in your eye without warning, you instinctively shut your eyes. Both are direct, bodily responses to an external situation. And, while an emotion can be a response to an external event, it's always done through a mental filter. Say you learn a car has been stolen. You may not be emotional but when it is your car, you will be upset. As he says, it's "amazing how much emotion a little mental concept like ‘my’ can generate."

A sense of ownership is a profound concept – one we all share but often find difficult to extrapolate to others. Think of things that aren’t yours until you claim them: that’s my shopping cart; that’s my parking place; my place in the line. Again, to Tolle’s point, the sense of ‘my’ can generate a lot of emotion. It’s easy to understand, really.

So I have this question: Can you turn my into our, and what changes if you do?

What changes when my country turns into our country? My affection for my community and my neighborhood turns into a deep connection to our neighborhood? What if the fires in Los Angeles are the fires that destroyed everything in my neighborhood? Poverty and disenfranchisement in my town is in our town? Managing care for my aging parents becomes managing care for our country’s elder population? And on and on and on.

We all very naturally care about our own. It takes a leap of faith, cognition and meta (and metta) analysis to really connect with everyone else and recognize how very deeply and personally we all feel that emotional sense of my.

We all have a “my”; when we see ourselves in others, that “my” can become an “I.”