When you walk up to someone and introduce yourself, you introduce yourself by one name.  What this means is that you see yourself as a single unit of consciousness.  You see yourself as an “I” or a “me”.  The problem is, this perception of yourself does not accommodate for the full truth of you.  In fact, it can obscure the truth of you.  If you see yourself in this way, you can only see the forest and not the trees.  In fact, the single biggest step you can take towards self-awareness and awakening is: To begin to see yourself as an ecosystem that is being called by one name.

You call yourself by one name, but you are in essence an accumulation of a very complex system of ‘smaller’ units of consciousness… Just like an ecosystem is.  To understand what I mean, look at the ecosystem of the Amazon Rainforest.  We call the Amazon Rainforest by one name, but it is an accumulation of its emergent layer, canopy layer, understory layer, forest floor layer; which themselves are composed of an accumulation of evergreen trees, flowering plants, birds, insects, reptiles, fungi, amphibians, rainfall and soil etc.

From objective perspective, each physical human is his or her own universe.  We could zoom in on a physical human and see that each thing that is included as a part of this human is in fact its own unit of consciousness.  And as a physical human, you have so many things that added together, equal you.   For example, you are an accumulation of your spiritual, mental, emotional and physical layers.  Just looking at your physical body, each cell of your body has its own consciousness.  Each organ also has its own unique consciousness and identity.  Your body contains more bacterial cells than human cells (about ten times more in fact) many of which you could not survive without.  They are integral to the system that makes up… you.  They are considered to be an integral part of you.  Your psyche is also not singular.  It is made up of many different ‘parts’.  We have the tendency of calling these parts ‘sides’ or ‘facets’ of a person’s personality.  To understand more about this, watch my video titled: Fragmentation, The Worldwide Disease.

Any ecosystem is a community of interacting organisms.  Any system is a community of interacting units of consciousness.  It is a complex, interconnected network.  The “system” that you are comprised of, like any system is unique.  There may be common trends that it shares with other systems to be found in the greater universe, but it has its own configuration and each different element of it has a specific relationship to all other parts of the system.  For example, your kidneys have a unique relationship to your bladder.  Your mental layer of consciousness has a unique relationship to your gut biome.  And these relationships, like any relationship can be or become one that is symbiotic and loving, dysfunctional and oppositional or anything in between.

We have to be able to zoom in and zoom out, in order to be fully conscious.  When we treat the assemblage that comprises us as if it is a single unit of consciousness, what we are doing is zooming out.  When you zoom out, you can see that the collective consciousness of any group of beings could be perceived as a single consciousness.  For example, there are millions of people on this planet and we could zoom out to see that if you add all of their consciousnesses together, we could call this single unit ‘the consciousness of humanity’.

In all honestly, you could zoom in and out indefinitely in this universe.  For example, even if you zoom in to become aware of the consciousness of a single cell, that single cell is also in fact its own ecosystem of even smaller units of consciousness.  And if you were to go into one part of a single cell, that part too would be its own ecosystem of sorts.  One reason we must be able to zoom out, is to be able to identify trends, commonalities and patterns for example.  To understand more about this, watch my video titled: The Surprising Truth, Generalization, Stereotyping and Uniqueness.

All this being said, to be conscious we must be able to do the opposite as well, to zoom in.  And this is what people have the hardest time doing, because they feel like in doing so, they lose a solid sense of a singular self.  The question soon becomes, if I am all of these things, then what am I?  The answer of course is that you are all of them and therefore, not any single one of them.  The zooming in process of conscious awareness, requires you to dis-identify.  If you would like to understand disidentification, you can watch my video titled: Disidentification (The Process of Non-Attachment).

When all you can see is the forest, and not any single tree within that forest, you fail to be truly conscious of what is happening in that forest.  Sticking with this analogy, it is ignorant to refuse to recognize that the tree has its own unique ‘self’; its own personal truths including likes and dislikes, desires and perspective as well as relationships to other trees and insects, soil and weather in the forest.  If you cannot recognize the unique consciousness that belongs to the tree, you will not be able to see, feel, hear or understand any of the problems that are happening in the system of the forest.

So often, when a person can’t figure out what is happening with them, it is because they are not zooming in.  They are looking at the forest and not at any single tree and the relationship that tree has to other trees and insects and soil etc.  You have to be able to get deep into the perspective of any one unit of consciousness that comprises you, in order to fully understand it and its relationship to other things within the system it belongs to.  And when you begin to do this, the symptoms you are seeing in that greater forest that is you, suddenly begin to make sense.  The second that the medical establishment understands this, the entire human approach to both illness and medicine will change.  If this concept interests you further, and you would like to dive a tiny bit deeper into a technique that can help you zoom in relative to yourself, feel free to watch my video titled: Parts Work, what is Parts Work and How to Do It.

I want you to ask yourself this question today and give yourself some time to answer it:  If It were true that my name is just the title given to an accumulation of an entire system of things that I am comprised of ( in other words: If I were to see myself as an ecosystem instead of as a single being), what would change for me?  How might I begin to live differently?  And how would I approach problems that arose in my life differently?

Seeing the reality of the amalgamation of different units of consciousness that culminates in you will change everything with regards to your approach to life.  It will make life feel so much more rich, deep and alive.  You will finally recognize the complexity of existence, and yet, the divine simplicity within that complexity.  You will find so many of the answers that you seek.