Why we all feel the way we do

The nature of consciousness and how we humans tend to deal with it leads to a sort of grand rollercoaster of emotion across the ages. We all see and feel the same things, we just all react to them in different ways depending on how deep into our subjective experience we are at any given moment.

The individual is a lie, there is only one person and it is you. You are the only person and you are all things at all times. This connectedness is hidden, and our own egos strive to hide it further from our conscious minds. We yearn to be individuals, the universe wants to experience new things and it does that through us. In your lifetime you will exist on that entire spectrum, there will be moments where you truly feel like the entire universe and there will be moments where you experience the terror of universal loneliness.

The truth is both of those feelings exist at once and you can move freely between them. Understanding this meta level of consciousness and how that works to shape the world we live in is the purpose of this article.

When the universe decides to experience something new, an individual is formed above the surface. This individual is given ego as both a motivator to seek out the new experiences and a smoke screen to block the individual from seeing their shared experience. Knowledge of the shared experience makes it more difficult to hurt another individual, so the universe needs to hide this from itself if it wants to experience everything, even wars.

Since we all exist up here and we all have ego we all end up sharing this delusion of a separate existence. This gives us the ability to do great things, Jane over there can write an amazing new book while Bob over here watches somebody else’s movie. Jane loves olives, but Bob doesn’t really like olives, aren’t these differences so unique and interesting? We’re being dismissive in this paragraph but it is important to stress this point.

This illusion of separateness that gives rise to all the great things humans can do is also the cause of all our pain. Jane can hit Bob because she believes she is separate from Bob. Jane can murder Bob for the same reason and her ego will build a completely valid narrative for why this was the right thing to do. Jane can kill herself because she thinks she is separate from everyone else.

And the reality is that up here at this ego level all those things can and do happen, and the other egos have to deal with the fallout. When Jane murders Bob, Alice the police officer ego has to come and fill out a report and arrest Jane. Peter the parole office ego now has to spend the rest of their life keeping Jane in line. These connections between people, the cause and effect, this forms a universal network of emotion.

Every act of ego expression is like a little bomb going off in the universe, everybody around it has to deal with the consequences. Some of those are very large like full on world wars, or sometimes they are very small like choosing to walk past a homeless person and not notice them. To the universe these are all the same, none matters more than any other, all that matters is that they are new. The pain and suffering from these events is something only another ego can experience.

So now what? “Here’s tom with the weather” eh? Time to change the channel, nothing can be done with this information right?

I say wrong. The next time you walk down the street notice that homeless person and smile and say hi even if you don’t have enough money to give them. The next time somebody cuts you off in traffic, don’t swear at them. If somebody bumps into you while walking apologize instead of getting angry. These events are the opposite of those ego expressions that seem like bombs. These events bring us closer together, they use the same universal network of connections but spread love instead of fear.

We cannot heal the world by waving a magic wand, but each of us has the power to use our knowledge of the connectedness of the world to spread positivity instead. Be a light onto others, it is the only way out.