I keep noticing the many layers of what I am in daily life. It’s always new, fresh, seamless, and lived.
And if I want to put it into words, I usually go to the distinction between who and what I am, and some distinctions within each of those.
WHAT I AM
As what I am, I am capacity for any and all of the always changing content of experience. This includes anything connected with this human self, any idea of a doer or observer, and so on.
I am this awake space that everything happens within and as – these hands, this screen, the music, the sun coming through the window, the fresh air, the sound of the birds, the marks appearing on the screen, the thoughts appearing, and so on. A thought may call this consciousness. I am consciousness and the consciousness I am takes the form of any and all content of experience.
I am all of this changing content of experience, this field of experience that’s ephemeral and always fresh and new. I don’t notice change directly, only by comparing mental representations of what just was to what is (and that too just was).
WHO I AM
This human self appears within the seamless field of experience. He lives his own life.
He is around quite often during waking hours. He is the one human being I have inside information about – what he sees, hears, senses, thinks, and so on.
He has innumerable sides and parts. He seems to be as rich as the wider world. Whatever I see in the wider world I can also find in him. Whatever story I have about someone or something, I can turn it to this human self and find genuine and specific examples of how it’s true.
He has wounds, traumas, hangups, and painful beliefs. These are all parts of him. These color his perception and life even when they are not triggered or activated.
Through working on these, I also notice that his healed and whole version is inherently and ordinarily kind and wise. Wounds, hangups, and traumas sometimes cover this up, especially when activated, and that’s part of the human experience too.
SEEING MYSELF IN OTHERS
I have explored this for a few decades now, often in some detail, and it’s always changing and it becomes visceral in always new and lived ways.
This colors how I see others.
When I see a “conscious being”, I know that they very likely are consciousness. To themselves, they are consciousness and the world, as it appears to them, happens within and as the consciousness they are.
I know they have innumerable parts and sides to them. What I see, what the world sees, and what they are aware of, are just some ideas about a tiny fraction of the richness that’s there.
If I see reactivity and trauma behavior, I know that’s on the surface. It comes from the system trying to protect itself, and I recognize it from myself. I have that in me too. Most – almost all? – trauma is intergenerational and collective. It’s passed on through generations and it’s passed on in society and through our culture and civilization.
I also know that who they “really” are, if they were healed and whole, is someone who is naturally and ordinarily kind and wise. Of course, that may just be there as a potential and it’s not something I can necessarily count on in daily life.
And, of course, my personality also operates from other conditioning – from this culture, the family I grew up in, and so on – so that too colors how I see myself and others.