The usual tendency in our modern secular thinking is to view the outer world as separate from ourselves, but it is actually just a partial reflection of what we fundamentally are.

Objective reality is one of two pieces. Both pieces make up the whole. The other part is our subjective world, which is our feelings, thoughts and beliefs.

In this ancient and rebirthed understanding, we are both the inner and outer worlds.

Now I could go into why quantum physics specifies that these two portions are inseparable, or why ancient wisdom and modern mystics say the same thing, but if we’re on this path, we intuitively and possibly even logically know this already.

Instead, I’m going to focus on what actually makes up our reality, as well as how to find true peace by loving our experience, because it’s not always easy to accept and embrace all of what we perceive in life.

Some of it is hard for our hearts to take and challenging for our minds to fathom. But our experience is much like an intimate relationship: it has its ups and downs, there are things that need to change, things that we wouldn’t change for the world and hard lessons that hopefully inspire us to develop ourselves. And just like we love our partner regardless of their positives and negatives, we should also love our experience, irrespective of its strengths and weaknesses.

Another way to look at it is by considering self-love. We should always love ourselves, even if sometimes we’re not proud of all our feelings, thoughts and actions. After all, we make mistakes as we learn and navigate our entire lives and grow into our new, more developed selves.

But our experience is much bigger than our ego or our illusory, separated self. It’s also includes the objects of our experience, because if we change the objects, we also change our experience. Therefore, our experience is the combination of these two realities; it’s an intimate interconnection between the inner and outer worlds.

Let’s put it in a simple model:

• Subjective world = feelings, thoughts, beliefs, actions
• Objective world = body, people, earth, universe
• Experience = the interconnected total of our subjective and objective worlds

This means there’s a bridge between these two seemingly separate realities.

Both pioneering science and contemporary spirituality view consciousness (or something like it) as the ground of all being and therefore the bridge of these realms. Though to be clear, the unifying factor is not our individual consciousness but the whole of consciousness.

One way to illustrate this is through the analogy of fire. Our individuality is one flame in the eternal fire and our ego is our flame’s heat. The non-ego part of us is our flame or spirit before ego starts to define it, as well as the entire fire. The fire is of course the unity of reality, which different people have different terms for, such as God, the quantum zero-point field, the spiritual conception of consciousness or just love itself.

All are the fire. All are consciousness. All are love.

One common assumption about our subjective consciousness is that it is generated by the big brain (containing 100 billion neurons), the second brain (100 million neurons embedded in the walls of our digestive system) and the heart (containing 40,000 neurons), much like a generator creates electricity. Even though this is voiced by some materialists as being a proven scientific fact, it’s not. It’s speculation based primarily on the evidence that tampering with the brains (particularly the big brain) in certain ways tampers with our awareness in particular ways too.

But just as all scientists and laymen alike should know, correlation does not imply causation. Just because our individual consciousness changes when we alter our brain doesn’t mean that the brain created consciousness in the first place.

The alternative explanation, which is receiving support from emerging scientific evidence, is that the brain receives or tunes into consciousness, much like a radio or television tunes into signals. If we tamper with our radio or TV set, it will no doubt have an associated impact on the way the signal is received, without actually changing the signal itself.

Therefore, just because modifying our brain alters our experience, doesn’t inherently mean that we have changed consciousness itself. We’ve simply changed our experience of consciousness.

This makes sense when we acknowledge that our experience is influenced by what’s happening both inside and outside of us. We’re tuning into particular frequencies of consciousness to have an experience that is co-created by both our inner and outer worlds.

When we begin to meditate, this point becomes even clearer. Think of our conscious awareness as the light from a torch and the night’s darkness as our subconscious mind. When we meditate, we can navigate through our subconscious mind by making it conscious with a torch light.

Meditation is therefore the act of navigating our conscious awareness through our subconscious mind, which is anywhere between 95 and 99 percent of the activity in our subjectivity. The more skilled we become at expanding our conscious mind with meditation, the deeper we go into the darkness of our subconscious mind.

Then suddenly, as many experienced meditators advocate, we reach beyond our subconscious mind.

In other words, advanced meditation can project our individual awareness into a cosmic consciousness or even consciousness itself. This is also a common experience when taking a psychedelic substance. Over and over again, through countless individuals and a wide array of tribal, traditional and current cultures, it is believed that during a psychedelic trip (or other trance-induced activity), the mind becomes one with the whole of reality.

In this instance, the line between the internal and external worlds has become reverently blurred. This is a big concept to entertain, but once we do, we arrive at an inevitable conclusion. If who we are is a melting between two interconnected worlds, and we love our ourselves, then we love both worlds. We therefore have a solid foundation to establish and maintain true love and true peace.

That isn’t to say that we must like everything about our internal and external realities, such as war, murder, emotional dysfunction, trauma etc.—just that we embrace it for what it is, which is a dual manifestation of our core, and then seek to change it for the better.

This is when loving our experience becomes an art, because we learn to consciously co-create our life in a way that is beautiful, inspiring, empowering, enlightening and above all loving.

Ultimately, we should love our experience just like we love ourselves, because it is us. It’s a sure-fire way to find true love and true peace.

Author: Phillip J Watt

Editor: Evan Yerburgh

Photo: Flickr