We Are Creating A World Of Suffering Because We Don't Know Any Better
Consider that the flow of ordinary social consciousness that is occupying your mind is really just thought pollution.
We think that the chaos around us is real and most of us are empowering this chaos without realizing it. Think of the righteous indignation that many of us have and vomit into our Facebook feeds. We think that the force of our anger will some how combat evil or cause change, but that is not how it works. We get angry we become anger. The moon and the stars along with the fly on the wall do not see justification and righteousness, they just see hate. Because human beings share a collective consciousness, when we become angry and express it to others, we do not extinguish the fire set by our enemy - we fuel that fire with even more negativity. Our reasons why are simply abstract logical arguments that are meaningless, but a punch in the nose is, justified or not, sets off a bonfire of rage that eventually burns everyone.
This happens because because we are fundamentally confused as to what we are. Be cause we manifest in our ordinary experience in three dimensions, we think we are things. The three dimensional world is primitive. Action in three dimensions requires force. If you want to move a table, you must assert force on it to make it move. Because this is our fundamental understanding of action, we think that this applies to the world of being as well. When someone does something we do not like, we try to make them stop doing it. Perhaps we might use brute force to achieve our goal or we might use metaphorical force by applying psychological pressure on them. Either way, it is the stuff of cavemen.
Human beings, though possessed with a physical form are animated by a consciousness that has no physical substance. In fact, consciousness is made up of nothing at all. Our sense of self is purely conceptual and has no inherent existence other than in our own conscious experience. Even when we feel pain, like burning ourselves on a hot pan, the nerves in our skin send an electrical signal to our brain that is interpreted by our mind as pain, but is really just an electrical signal. It is our consciousness that turns the signal into the experience of pain. It seems real enough to us at the time. And yet, a highly realized human being can be lit on fire and sit in meditation without as much as fluttering an eyelid until he simply dies - never once having suffered at all. How can this be? It begins by understanding how consciousness works and distinguishing the tricks that your consciousness plays on you.
This happens because because we are fundamentally confused as to what we are. Be cause we manifest in our ordinary experience in three dimensions, we think we are things. The three dimensional world is primitive. Action in three dimensions requires force. If you want to move a table, you must assert force on it to make it move. Because this is our fundamental understanding of action, we think that this applies to the world of being as well. When someone does something we do not like, we try to make them stop doing it. Perhaps we might use brute force to achieve our goal or we might use metaphorical force by applying psychological pressure on them. Either way, it is the stuff of cavemen.
Human beings, though possessed with a physical form are animated by a consciousness that has no physical substance. In fact, consciousness is made up of nothing at all. Our sense of self is purely conceptual and has no inherent existence other than in our own conscious experience. Even when we feel pain, like burning ourselves on a hot pan, the nerves in our skin send an electrical signal to our brain that is interpreted by our mind as pain, but is really just an electrical signal. It is our consciousness that turns the signal into the experience of pain. It seems real enough to us at the time. And yet, a highly realized human being can be lit on fire and sit in meditation without as much as fluttering an eyelid until he simply dies - never once having suffered at all. How can this be? It begins by understanding how consciousness works and distinguishing the tricks that your consciousness plays on you.
Transcend Into The World Of Being
A Human Table: Our Awareness of Being Disappears When We Allow Our Consciousness Turn Beings Into Things
When we objectify living beings, we reduce them to things. This makes it easier for us to abuse them. For example, when we objectify a cow, it is much easier to kill it because we are only allowing our mind to experience meat as a thing. We do not consider the experience of the cow being slaughtered and the terror and dismay it feels as its conscious departs its body. Similarly, when someone cuts you off in traffic, you might unleash a murderous rage. If you were to suddenly realize that the person who cut you off in traffic was your mother or your best friend, your rage would nearly instantly disappear because no longer are you offended by a meaningless thing, you are now aware of a being.
Being is the totality of a living thing in at least four dimensions. There are the three dimensions of the physical manifestation, but now we are conscious of the mind of the being that is experienced with the added dimension of time, the fourth dimension. If we did not experience our loved ones over time, we would have no way to love them. Love arises from our experiences over time and the narrative that we conceptualize to remember these experiences. Hence, a living thing becomes a being to us when we formulate the story in our minds as to who they are in relation to the story that we are constantly writing and editing about who we believe ourselves to be.
The awareness of being requires considerable mental power. Being can be complex or simple depending on how much detail we observe and weave into our conscious narrative. While being is entirely contrived in our minds, the awareness of being allows us to create collective consciousness that, in turn, allows us to live in families and build great societies. It is fueled by awareness of the experience of others. In the world of being we can create alliances, fall in love, orchestrate space travel as well as plot to murder someone. By being present to the world of being, however, we are able to directly impact our experience even without consulting the world of things. We can create a joyous experience simply in our imagination without having to manipulate the physical world. This is because our mind is trained to relate to our conceptual experience first and the physical world second in most cases. This explains while two people can look at the same work of art and one can love it and the other hate it.
Because the world of being is where most of our lives really occur, in the beginning of our quest for the experience of peace and happiness, it would seem logical that this is the place to start. We want to start to understand how the world of being arises, how we can manage it and use it to help us create peace and happiness. This requires some study as to how we fabricate our experience and what we can do to liberate ourselves from experiences that seem to control us rather than us controlling them.
Being is the totality of a living thing in at least four dimensions. There are the three dimensions of the physical manifestation, but now we are conscious of the mind of the being that is experienced with the added dimension of time, the fourth dimension. If we did not experience our loved ones over time, we would have no way to love them. Love arises from our experiences over time and the narrative that we conceptualize to remember these experiences. Hence, a living thing becomes a being to us when we formulate the story in our minds as to who they are in relation to the story that we are constantly writing and editing about who we believe ourselves to be.
The awareness of being requires considerable mental power. Being can be complex or simple depending on how much detail we observe and weave into our conscious narrative. While being is entirely contrived in our minds, the awareness of being allows us to create collective consciousness that, in turn, allows us to live in families and build great societies. It is fueled by awareness of the experience of others. In the world of being we can create alliances, fall in love, orchestrate space travel as well as plot to murder someone. By being present to the world of being, however, we are able to directly impact our experience even without consulting the world of things. We can create a joyous experience simply in our imagination without having to manipulate the physical world. This is because our mind is trained to relate to our conceptual experience first and the physical world second in most cases. This explains while two people can look at the same work of art and one can love it and the other hate it.
Because the world of being is where most of our lives really occur, in the beginning of our quest for the experience of peace and happiness, it would seem logical that this is the place to start. We want to start to understand how the world of being arises, how we can manage it and use it to help us create peace and happiness. This requires some study as to how we fabricate our experience and what we can do to liberate ourselves from experiences that seem to control us rather than us controlling them.