“All that we now see, and will ever see, unto eternity, is ourself”.
At first glance this statement appears as an indictment of humanity as being solipsistic creatures with little capacity to see “the other” in its infinite complexity of manifestation. On one level this is true, as the person deeply wounded through trauma or unforgiving to individuals or groups of people perceived to have victimized them tends to see the world, and those that wounded them, through the same set of judgmental eyeglasses regardless of the changing conditions of life.
Another level to the first statement is the lifetime accumulation of knowledge, concepts and assessments that each of us make, and utilize for perceiving the world around us. This knowledge, concepts, and assessments is what contributes to our sense of self, so when we access the perceptual mechanisms, they are all guided by ourselves and our past relationship with life, Thus, when we perceive, all that we see is ourselves as expressed through our perceptual channels.
When we introduce the concept of sympathy, and then empathy, conditions start to change a bit. Now, there is a possibility for one to feel another, either through shared sorrow at a loss, or through actually attempting to see as another human being sees and feels through the empathetic channel. When empathy is successfully applied, not only do we now see as the other sees, we see the other as an expression of ourself, a self that has aspects now recognized to be shared. When Jesus stated that “when two or more are gathered in my name, I am there” he was alluding to a universal quality of people sharing spiritual energy and thus sharing in an elevated sense of self, a new understanding of who we are in relationship with humanity.
Compassion is another attribute of human experience that enables us to lovingly witness anothers’ suffering without joining in with the suffering. We have all suffered, yet compassion allows for us to be present for another without being in judgment against the suffering person. The compassionate one will indicate to the sufferer that there is other ways of looking at an issue, and other ways of reacting to it, that can reduce one’s suffering. As suffering tends to dramatically reduce one’s vision outside of one’s problems, the reduction or elimination of suffering naturally makes the healed person more available for others, and the world, thus expanding their sense of who they are, and becoming capable of loving others more honestly and completely.
Yet, most of what I have mentioned previously relates to our mental conceptions based self, and all of the perceptual mechanisms that we employ in our expression of our unique self. we have seen that our concept of self expands as we evolve spiritually. We start in a fairly isolated state, only seeing our self and our isolation. then we progress to start seeing the other, through empathy, forgiveness, and compassion. Now our sense of self begins to include the collective energy of humanity, and our world view is now much less limited.
But what about the so-called cosmic self, a state of being unified with the proposed and theoretical universal field of consciousness? This exalted state of evolution comes to very few people, and rarely stays for long when it does. Cosmic consciousness is all-inclusive state of being where we recognize we are an emanation of the very universe that has created all, and we are a conscious agent of that connection with the universe. Now, all that we see, or will ever see, unto eternity, is our exalted self, our collective self, and our individual self. So in this stage of unfoldment, we see clearly our self, and our limitations as an isolated self. We also see that we are the very mind of our collective self, or mankind, sharing in all of the drama, trauma, and capacity for healing, or stubbornness, that the rest of humanity possesses. We see its limitations as well, with all of its intergenerational trauma, and spiritual and historical failings posing as religions or social movements such as governments. In the cosmic self, we now have access to pure creativity, and our energy is more sourced from the universal, than from our interactions with the rest of humanity, though all energy is recognized for its importance, especially as we develop greater insight into what it really means to have a self that sees, perhaps all the way into infinity itself.
