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We are always dealing with our own consciousness, even if we think we are dealing with someone else and what they have said or done.
Indeed. Everything that we experience is happening within our own consciousness. We cannot experience anything outside our consciousness.
The example was given above of seeing a bully taunting a person. How do we experience that bully? Through the sense perceptions of sight and hearing, which our mind interprets as an external person behaving unpleasantly and we form a judgement about that.
Yet all this is happening within our own consciousness. The taunter and the person being taunted only exist for us as sense perceptions. The words used are just another sense perception. Any interpretation and judgements of these sense perceptions occur within us.
In other words, even though we all participate in an apparent shared objective reality, all that we can know is our own subjective experience.
That applies to this forum. This forum is an apparent shared objective reality where various people put forward their ideas. We read postings, we assume the existence of various people around the world making these postings, we enjoy reading some postings, we disagree with other postings. But what I am actually experiencing is sitting at my desk looking at words on a screen and typing other words in response. The next time I open my computer, more words have appeared. But it is all subjective experience within my own consciousness.
And we can take it a stage further. We see words and interpret those words a certain way. But all that we really see are shapes and colours, and our minds give meaning to these shapes and colours, and we experience the shifting of mental or emotional energies as a response to the meaning we give.
So all that we experience is simply movement occurring within consciousness. The strange thing is that we sometimes get upset by what is happening within our own consciousness; perhaps we believe that someone who only exists (for us) as our mental construct should behave differently or should speak differently. It is such a convincing drama that we get caught up in it all and behave as if it is real and valid.
Peace.
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