Most of us have highly limited conceptions of ourselves. We don’t realize our true power nor our ability to affect others and the world as a whole. Below are a few ideas to help you realize you’re more than it may seem.
The Physical Self
We tend to think of ourselves as ending where our skin meets the air. In truth, even our physical selves expand to infinity.
Each of us has a gravitational field that extends outward in all directions forever, even after we die. Even though the effect is small, our individual gravitational fields affect everyone and everything on Earth, and everyone and everything in the universe, forever.
Parts of us become parts of other people and things, and parts of other people and things become parts of us. Our bodies are always changing. Cells, and especially atoms, are continually falling off of our bodies and being absorbed by other people, plants, objects, everything. Maybe some of the atoms that used to be part of you are now part of a leaf atop a tree. Some of the atoms from a coffee bean grown in Costa Rica may now be part of your body. Maybe an atom that’s currently part of your eye was once part of a wombat’s sphincter.
Everything is fluctuating and changing always, even in a physical sense, and we are more connected to everyone and everything around us than this grand illusion would have us believe.
Even solidity itself is an illusion, one we create with our perception. Atoms are mostly space, and we never actually touch anything like it seems we do.
We each generate an electromagnetic field around us, originating mostly from our hearts, and these fields extend to infinity forever. Although most people can’t consciously interpret the information given via our electromagnetic fields, I believe all of us receive and process that information subconsciously, and that others’ fields have real, tangible effects on us all. (Topic of a future post.)
You know when you meet someone and you just feel the love? Or you feel the depression and the anger? Maybe part of how we receive that non-verbal information is via others’ electromagnetic fields, in addition, obviously, to body language, facial expressions, and speech. But sometimes a person’s body language, facial expressions, and speech can contradict the feeling you have of him/her.
Point is, even your physical self expands far beyond where it seems to end.
The Emotional Self
Although it seems to me that emotions actually do have a physical, electromagnetic reality, I will keep them separate from the physical self for the purposes of this article.
Your happiness spreads to others around you, and to the world as a whole in a significant way, just as your sadness and anger do.
If you’re joyful enough, just by entering a room full of people, you can change the overall feel of the room. You can spread happiness just by being happy yourself. The same goes for sadness.
Your emotions emanate from you and affect those around you, and then everyone around them, etc. Emotions are not stuck in your head, no matter how hard you try to conceal them. They expand outward and affect everyone.
The Eternal Self
Opinions differ as to whether we are eternal consciousnesses willingly incarnated physically, or if we are purely physical beings, simply the result of randomly grouped particles and evolution. If you’ve read pretty much any other article on this site, you know where I stand on the matter.
Your eternal consciousness, your soul, spirit, or whatever you want to call it, has always existed and will always exist. Time is simply a parameter under whose rule we agree to live upon incarnating.
Who you really are, your eternal self, is limitless and omniscient, which I would imagine could get quite boring. That’s one of the reasons we come here in the first place: to experience (or re-experience) finiteness, limitations, time, and all other apparent rules of our physical reality.
If you had the choice to erase just the memory of your very favorite movie, wouldn’t you take that opportunity and then sit down to watch it again? Maybe again and again and again. I know I would. Or to replay your all-time favorite video game as if you never had.
We are all much more than our simple human selves, beautiful as they are.
The Point?
In the end, the point is simply that we are much more than it may seem. If our physical and emotional selves are greater than they seem, is it such a stretch to imagine that all aspects of your self are more capable than they seem? That your creative, athletic, intellectual, sexual, and all other selves only seem to be limited, but in reality they are much greater?
I know this to be the case.
Just by realizing that you are more capable than you had thought, you reveal a hidden door behind which vast swaths of potential have been incubating for your entire life, waiting to be released. All that’s left to do is twist the knob and push.
(That’s what she said.)