There are many ways to see.

I can live as if my awareness is all there is – my experiencing my life is all there is.

I can choose to expand my consciousness to include those around me.  When I experience my life I can include my Mother, my Father, and my Siblings in my consciousness.  I can include my community in my consciousnesses.  I can include my immediate natural world.

In this expanded consciousness, it is no longer only about me.  My experience is not all there is because I am cognizant that life is expressing itself around me.  Beings are affected by my actions and act independently of me.  There is health and there is sickness.  There are terrible hardships and incredible successes.  This means that I might not think only of myself when I act and I have the context of others’ experiences and actions in interpreting and inspiring my own.

Once I include my family or my community or my immediate natural world in my consciousness, they are not necessarily there permanently or constantly.  In a moment I can revert to think only of my own existence.  I can lose myself in emotion.  Humans are passionate beings!  When I allow these passions to reign, I can cause myself unnecessary suffering.  I can also do and say things that I regret.

I can also expand my consciousness wider than just my immediate environment.  I think it is natural to think only in the context of our human lives.  Why would I think outside the confines of my life and my experience?  How is that even possible?  In the beginning of humanity, we can imagine how these questions might have some validity.  Without language, how might I experience anything outside of my immediate experiences and immediate environment?  It would be much more difficult!

With language, though, we can communicate and share experiences.  We can orally pass down and accumulate knowledge from generation to generation, expanding our consciousness to include those who preceded us.

We have created technologies that allow humans to expand this exponentially further.  Specifically the technologies of pen and paper and any subsequent technologies of recording and storing information.  These technologies allow us to store the human experience.  They allow us to build and accumulate our understanding in all areas.  Without these technologies, it would have been impossible to have made the material advances we have made over the course of human existence on Earth.

Very recently, the internet has allowed this historical record as well as real-time additions to it to be accessed instantly most places in the world.  We can instantly learn about the infiniteness of the Universe.  We can learn about the age of the Earth.  We can learn about the age of humanity.

Well, not everyone can.  And those of us who can can learn about those that can’t.  We can learn about the inequalities that exist in the world and that have existed throughout history.  We can learn about the history of humanity’s potentiality for supreme beauty and terrible atrocity.

We can conversely also use these tools so as to keep our own experience under microscopic and vigilant awareness.

So, there is a range of consciousness.  It can shrink or expand.  And its ability to both shrink and expand has been exponentially increased by human technologies.  Why would I shrink or expand it?

As I shrink my consciousness, I again become completely absorbed in my experience.  My experiencing my experience is all there is.  In this state, every emotion becomes consuming.  I am selfish.  I am all that matters.  Over and above the hopefully evident deficiencies of this way of experiencing life, in such a state I am highly unlikely to be able to have successful relationships with others and to be successful in my endeavors because every negative emotion equates to the destruction of my entire experience!  Even the smallest setbacks or slights are all-consuming.

As I grow my consciousness, my own personal experience becomes smaller and smaller.  Over 7 billion people are currently experiencing life with me.  Many of them are right now victims of unspeakable atrocities.  The human experience is hundreds of thousands of years old.  My 80 or 100 years of life is but a speck of dust on a speck of dust of the life of the Earth.  Millions of different species have walked the Earth over its history of billions of years.  The Earth is nothing to the infiniteness of the Universe.  With this expanded consciousness, my own personal emotions are so small they barely even exist.  I am aware of all that is around me and all that has come before me and that might come after.  I am aware of how I am connected to everything and everyone around me.  In such a state, I am highly likely to be able to respond to life with perspective.  In my relationships, I can respond to slights with compassion.  In my endeavors, I can take failures on the chin and respond with resolve and gratitude knowing the trials of others in the world and those that have come before me.

* * *

Now, I must make a personal confession.  I believe that I have an obligation to expand my consciousness.  To use the magical technologies I have available to me to think outside of my immediate experiences.  To read and to learn.

When I face troubles I ask myself: how can I complain?  Who am I to complain?  How are my troubles unique?  Slavery and genocide and concentration camps exist today.  I think it is an affront and an insult to people in these situations to complain about my life.

I don’t even have to look to people in these situations to have these thoughts.  Every single person has their own difficulties to deal with – how selfish am I to think that mine are so special?  And forgetting others, is it even logical to complain about my puny existence in the context of the vastness of the Universe?  Not in the slightest, my Soul!

I think maybe you can sense my passion on the subject.

But then, my passion and my emotions are nothing.

I continue on my mission at peace.