Everything that has come to be in this moment is a by-product of everything that has ever been. Its inescapable. The future begins right here inside you, and it is based on the contributions of every human who has ever lived.

You could not be who you are, were it not for all that has come before you. Like the ocean wave that laps up onto the shore, you are the culmination of many forces meeting, affecting each other, and then moving on.

Wow, isnt that deep! Perhaps an easier way to say it is at any one time, we only get to see an infinitesimally small portion of anything. So much has gone on to get to each instant its incredible! So much so that you get to wonder how we seem to know anything at all with the amazing limitations of our fleeting perception.

Tomorrow, this article will just be one of innumerable influences on your life. Perhaps it will have lasting value to you. Perhaps not. Who we are is a product of accumulated experiences just like that. Based on this, it would appear none of us would really be able to understand another because, on the surface, each of us is composed of moments that the others have not seen.

Yet we all know this is not the case. When someone teaches you a lesson of some sort, you are taking their experience of their moments and running it through the filter of your experience of your moments. Through that, based on a commonality drawn from symbols you can understand, you can then weave the experience into the fabric of your life.

As example, Moby Dick is a story of Captain Ahabs obsession with a foe. We all can relate to the account of his experience because, in essence, we are ALL experiencing the same story; were just getting it through different symbols.

What Melville did was to take the personal story of a mans obsession which exists in the unseen as a universal drive and gave it physical character in the form of the written word; the seen. The resulting book holds the history of a life that never was, as told through the mouth of someone who has never been. Still, we embrace the work and praise it for shedding light on areas of our psyche that have been hidden in shadows. Within his creation, we recognize ourselves.

Where did all this come from? Nowhere. Dollars to doughnuts, Melville was just immersed in telling a particular story, the universality of it came as a by-product.

Moby Dick is now something that is part of the psyche of everyone who has ever read it, yet none of us has ever seen the things happening that were described. The unwitnessed, however, has been seen in the minds eyes of the readers. And from that comes a bit of a miracle, for as an extension of that imagined experience comes something (seemingly) brand new. Just look at all the books that have been written about Melville and Moby Dick, each offering insights into the piece as well as life itself!

Whatever insights were gained have been around since before any of the books were ever written. If translated into languages that existed before Melville had been born, and read by the people of that time, chances are the universal message would still come through. Thats the unseen Melville worked with, and thats what were working with. In every moment.

A metaphor is defined as One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol. Healers, in order to be effective with all whom they are called to affect, understand that each of us are living out a metaphor for the experience of life.

Essentially, we are all experiencing the same thing, only through different metaphors that are determined by genetic, social, geographical, economic, spiritual, (and on and on) influences.

At its root, this is an attitude of inclusion rather than separation. It's knowing that whatever is seen by the other, if subject to a bit of translation, can be seen by you.

Still, its not that easy to either attain or maintain. Thats because sometimes the metaphor in front of you is so obscured by the difference in symbols that youve learned to embrace that, no, you really cant get it.

But if you work hard enough at it -- and that means allowing yourself to get in touch with what lives deepest inside of all of us; that we only wish to live -- then you have a universal common-ground from which to begin a healing moment with another being.