To me, “being human” means “being embodied consciousness”. This implies:

• We have a physical body, rather than being a physical body.
• We can experience emotions and we have a mind that we can use to analyse things. In addition to the physical body we have an emotional body and a mental body (and several other bodies).
• We can experience our body as our own physical density AND we can become aware of more refined frequencies of consciousness while living life in a physical body.

• In essence, we are our own particular part of consciousness (which you might call your “Universal Self” or “soul”), which has created a physical body on planet Earth (and with planet Earth) and which is interconnected with all other parts of consciousness. We are “consciousness incarnated into a human body on planet Earth”.
• This means that all life forms around us – including other human beings, other animals, plants, the Earth, the other planets – all of these may seem to be separate from us, but they are not: this is just an illusion that we have been conditioned to believe in (see the note * below).
  Indigenous cultures from around the globe still reflect in their way of life that humans are not separate from the rest of nature and the Earth.
  Once you become aware of and acccustomed to more and more refined frequencies of consciousness, the illusion of separation falls away and you actually experience that everything comes from the same Source.
• This also implies that death is a transition. The Universal Self leaves the body – and it may or may not reincarnate into another body for another round of experiences later on.
  Once you understand this, grieving for loved ones who died may still be painful and you may miss them a lot in your day-to-day physical world, but at least you know their souls are still following their own path.

To live is to create your life

That is to say: my Universal Self is carefully creating my ‘personal’ life circumstances, so that it can experience and learn from them. We are co-creating our lives with other souls around us. To the extent we are aware of this, we may use the ‘outside world’ as a mirror that reflects back to us what is still in our unconscious and ready to be brought into the light.

Ehm, does that mean that any experience in my life that I judge to be ‘negative’ is my own fault, and that I am ‘guilty’ of attracting it into my life? For instance, does that mean that I am guilty of being made redundant or fired from my job? No. It seems to me that the idea of ‘guilt’ or the idea of ‘being bad’ is very much a part of our conditioning (see the note * below).

However, I do feel that I am responsible for how I perceive such experiences, and for my reaction or response to them. (Please note: response-ability is NOT the same as guilt.)
When five people are involved in the same situation, each person has a different experience. If I am willing to become aware of what a particular situation is about for me, I can become aware of the unconscious beliefs and conditioning that shape my response; they are part of my Personal Self or ‘ego’. Then I can change my point of view by doing inner work (like emotional processing), so that next time around my response will be different. This is what I mean by taking responsibility for your own reactions and learning from them.

You can transform your own perception if you are ruthlessly & gracefully honest with yourself. And you can ask someone to help you gain insight into your blind spots and help you heal yourself. I definitely needed and still need several people along the way, to point things out to me and help me remember other ways of living my life.

After more and more healing, emotional processing and/or resolving cultural conditioning, this particular kind of experience will not have to appear into my life anymore (see for instance the ‘processing instructions’ on Lucia René’s website, and the book by Leslie Temple-Thurston mentioned in the post ‘Inspirations‘).

* – Note
Especially in the Western world:

(1) we have been conditioned to believe the ‘scientific’ worldview that we are nothing more than our physical bodies, separated from everything else, and that our mind/ our ratio is all-important to running our lives. (in contrast, The mind is “just an analytical tool in the attic” in Lucia René‘s words, by which she indicates that our mind is just a tool, rather than the part of us that has to direct all of our lives – which it cannot possibly do, because we are so much more than a body, emotions and a mind).

(2) or for those of us in the West who were raised within a religious framework, we have roughly been conditioned to believe that we have a body and a soul and we have but this one life to live, and so we must behave as the church-fathers tell us to, to have a pleasant eternal afterlife in heaven.

This patriarchical conditioning has been cutting humans off from experiencing the awareness of our Universal Self (our own consciousness or ‘soul’) and the interconnectedness of all consciousness. It is spreading fear and division among humans, and teaching us to subject ourselves to an authority outside of ourselves (government, church, educational institutions, medical industry et cetera). That way, we are allowing others to control us into obedience.

Elements of this conditioning that you may recognise are: “human beings are superior to all other life forms, including the Earth herself”; “women should be subjected to men”; “some groups of people are superior to other groups of people” (think of e.g. skin colour, abilities/disabilities, social circumstances); “you are guilty of XYZ and therefore you do not deserve to …”; “there is not enough of this (money, natural resources etc), so you have to feel guilty about having it or enjoying it while others do not”; “life is about killing or being killed”; “humans are a warring species”; “nature has to be controlled” et cetera.

The good news is, you can free yourself from all these limiting beliefs. That is, you can if you are willing to take responsibility for your own life and learn how to clear your perception from those limitations.

For inspiration, look at the websites of the people mentioned in my post ‘Inspiration‘, and feel who resonates with you.