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Do you ever wonder how some people can think or do the things that they do? I know I have. I could never understand how people could inflict such cruelty or take the life of another being. I now understand better why people behave the way they do, though explaining it requires a deep examination of our essential nature, consciousness.
I believe that everything that we experience arises from consciousness. Consciousness is the bedrock of all existence. There can be no experience without the awareness of it. Consciousness has no quality to it. It does not have a size, shape, or color. For this reason, you can think of consciousness as air.
Given this, consciousness, in its purest form, cannot have an experience as it can only know itself. It is like the air cannot know a cloud. To have an experience, consciousness must limit or restrict itself so that it can manifest itself. It is kind of like the way air has no qualities until it is used to inflate a balloon. While the balloon is not the air, it can fully manifest because of it.
It is this limited version of consciousness that becomes conditioned by experiences. Each one of us is an aspect of consciousness whose perspective is shaped by our conditioning. Our conditioning comes from our heritage, how we were raised, our society, and our personal experiences. It is from our conditioned perspective that our beliefs and behaviors are determined.
While someone may do things that I can never imagine doing myself, their actions make perfect sense to them. It makes sense because their actions are consistent with their experience of reality, which brings me to another point. Each person’s perception of reality is unique to them. Though we have shared experiences of reality, each one of us experiences it differently. While snakes are a shared experience, how we perceive snakes will differ with each person. Some people will avoid snakes at all costs, while others make careers studying them.
So many psychological and spiritual practices stress the importance of compassion because it allows us to connect with others at a deeper level than our diverse perspectives. It allows us to connect with the essence of consciousness, unity consciousness, which is the oneness of everything.
