Consciousness. Sometimes I can't even spell it correctly. But it's been on my mind lately (pun intended) for varying reasons and I wanted to ponder it here.
Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception. Alan Moore
This is really the gist of it. I completely agree with what Alan Moore has said above. And I'd like to take some time to write about it. According to Wikipedia, Alan Moore is an acclaimed comic book writer and somewhat of an interesting character. But to me, he nailed my concept of consciousness above.
Have you ever wondered if what you are seeing with your eyes is really what is around you? We have several methods to perceive what is around us: sight, touch, sense, hearing. But imagine for a moment you are blind. You are launched into a world of darkness. Is what you see now in front of you actually there? Or just so because you perceive it is there? You can touch it and you can bump into it (I'm currently thinking about my dresser as I imagine this...) but is it truly there?
Before you wonder what I've smoked tonight, let me allay your concerns and tell you that I have not done anything to alter my perception of my perceptions :-) Just like I said...been on my mind lately.
Let's take a less concrete example than the dresser. We can pretty much gather through proven fact and scientific data that the dresser I see here in my bedroom is in fact, there. Line 10 people up (but please allow me to put on a sweater or something) here in my room and barring any visual impairments, 10 out of 10 people will agree that my dresser is indeed in the corner where I perceive it.
But...if we take something less concrete, things get more complicated. Perhaps it is my perception of a circumstance, or my perception of a situation, or my perception of a relationship. These perceptions become my reality and serve as parts of my consciousness. However, these perceptions can and often are completely false. Does that make my reality a falsehood and if so, does it also my consciousness? What makes someone else's perception of the way I perceive them to be more correct than my own? Because I cannot perceive something as someone else does, does that always make my perceptions right- for me?
I think this is where empathy comes in. Empathy really is the ability to perceive someone else's emotions and to respond appropriately to them (sympathy, feeling, etc). The lack of empathy for other human beings is a key characteristic in personality disorders such as narcissism and sociopathy- scary stuff. I trend towards the overly empathetic side of things but gravitate towards those with little empathy for my circumstances. A strange balance.
Empathy plays into perception because I think it can change perception. If I can have empathy for someone else, it may change what I had perceived as my truth; or at least shed some light on it. For those who lack empathy...what is their perception of life like? What is their consciousness like? Do I even...want to know?
I do- from a collegial perspective. Put me in a room (throw a muscle-ripped guard in there with me for good measure) with a psychopath or a schizophrenic and I am one happy camper. I love the abnormal mind. And I kind of think...the abnormal mind loves me. I have been pondering working in prison psychology or perhaps at a prison where the criminals are classified as insane.
It all circles back for me about the awareness of the fact that my consciousness and my perceptions are not always going to be what is truly happening. In fact, that is going to be rare. People I meet daily (who are not criminally insane) perceive completely different realities than I do. Isn't that so strange?! How do we even function as a human race...bumping into each other on all these strange planes of reality and perception. I think that's where the soulmate concept comes in. It's someone you meet who is really on that same plane you are- who really does perceive things in a very similar fashion as you do and who is conscious truly on the same, or similar, level as you. And you know it instantly. And you can't separate from them...time and/or distance will never let it go. It defies explanation.
I have a friend like that. She was my very first friend whom I met in kindergarten. We grew up together and drifted apart when I moved away to go to high school. Several years later, I discovered that she lived only a few miles from me in the same city. We'd had an amazing amount of similar circumstances through the years we were apart and though it seemed like coincidence to us, we both knew- we just float on the same frequency. We always have and we always will. A soul mate. Awesome pick up line, by the way: "Hey, I sense you vibrate on the same frequency as I do, thus making our perceptions of realities very similar and elevating our sense of consciousness- together."
Flying around this very town, state, country, hemisphere and universe are an infinite number of perceptions. Every circumstance will be perceived in infinite ways. This tangled web and matrix somehow becomes our reality- and that reality is what makes us conscious, sentient beings. It seems so complicated. But is it? What's keeping it all in order? How is order in a world like this even possible? What is spinning that complicated web?
As Mr. Moore said above, our only Universe is perception.
And by the way, the girlfriend I was talking about above? One of my soul mates? Her last name is Moore. Go figure.
