Delusion of Consciousness

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. 

--Albert Einstein

You're not your ancestors.

You're not your culture.

You're not your beliefs.

You're not your government, country, or flag.

You're not the labels forced upon you by society.

You're not even an individual. You see yourself as distinct, as whole, as singular, as separate from your fellow humans and your environment, but this is a delusion of your consciousness.

This delusion robs you of your humanity. It distorts your perspective. It tricks you into seeing an enemy in the face of your brother. It causes you to identify with falsehoods and trivial matters. 

Stop attaching yourself to things that aren't you. Stop perpetuating the sins of your fathers. Wake up and do better than your predecessors.

Evolve.

We all come from the same source. Whether you believe that source is Adam, the first man, or a single-cell prokaryote that came to life 3.5 billion years ago, it makes no difference: you agree that we are all related. Look around you at the war, genocide, poverty, famine, and pollution.

Why is our family so dysfunctional?

All humans know love and fear, joy and suffering, hope and despair. Recognize yourself in the face of your so-called enemy. See that they are, on the most basic level, no different from you. They yearn to live, loath to suffer, and pursue happiness.

Beneath your religious beliefs, ethnic identity, cultural conditioning, judgments, biases, and petty grudges, aren't you the exact same? If you loath to suffer, how can you justify making others suffer? If you yearn to live, how can you justify taking the life of another?

So long as a corrupt few succeed in convincing you that we're all different, that we can't get along, and that our well-being and survival depends on the suffering and death of others, we will never know peace. In Ephesians 6:12, Paul writes:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high [places].

Greed and ignorance are the powers against which we wrestle.

Greed is a sickness that corrupts men to their very core. It is an insatiable hunger for power that overrides all other desires and decencies. Ignorance, on the other hand, allows the greedy to spread their lies, thereby facilitating their actions. Do you not question why governments are always cutting funds to public education, the one thing that could improve the lives of the masses?

The corrupt spread lies to muddle your identity. Any time you identify as a patriot, God-fearing Christian, libertarian, or anything else that isn't truly you, you are being mislead. False labels are like double-agents; they infiltrate your psyche, sabotage your personality, and create turmoil within. The real you cannot thrive in such a chaotic environment.

As the psalmist wrote, "Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it." Not for God and the reward of heaven but for yourself, here and now, and for your brothers and sisters across the world.

Everything is made up of the same universal coding, 1's and 0's stacked in a dizzying array of configurations. We see differences by virtue of imperfect sense-organs. We feel solid matter where there is empty space. We see colour where light strikes pigment and rebounds into our eyes. We smell and taste particles with the little receptors in our noses and mouths. We touch surfaces and judge them smooth or rough, yet these are merely signals from nerve to mind.

All is illusion. Nothing is as it seems.

What you call reality is only your imperfect and subjective interpretation of the Truth, which is this: the universe manifests itself through matter and energy, but through humans it also experiences itself.

As Alan Watts wrote:

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

Come together now. Stop killing one another over superficial and illusory differences. The words "Israelite" and "Palestinian" are symbols attached to vague meaning. We need not be subject to words and labels. We need not recognize imaginary lines drawn by dead men. We need not resort to violence and conflict to resolve our quarrels.

We can work together instead of against each other.

There can be no peace in the world until we find peace within ourselves, and this is impossible to do so long as we believe the lie of individuality. Awaken the light inside yourself and dispel the delusion of your consciousness.

Dissolve your ego. There is no "you," only the collective of which you are a part.

/rant over