70. A New Form Of Life

You’re forever stuck with your own point of view. There’s no way to escape from your subjectivity. There’s no way to see yourself as you exist in this moment from outside your own body.

Even advanced technology capable of recording your every word, expression, and movement wouldn’t help. A recording can’t solve the problem because what you actually want is to be able to observe yourself in each and every moment as it happens. You want to see yourself right now, from a third-person perspective, without being influenced by your observations. But there is no tool that can offer this kind of objectivity.

You want to understand yourself, but you can’t even do something as simple as seeing what you look like through the eyes of the other. To become the other and observe the self is the dream, but it is seemingly unattainable.

The closest you might be able to get is to see the self and the other as parts of a continuous whole rather than as distinct entities. For the distinction between them, which seems entirely obvious, is also constructed and imposed. And that means it could be otherwise — you could see the whole world as a single being of which you are only a part.

But to become fully capable of this other way of seeing, you would have to be able to incorporate the experience of every other being into your own experience. You would have to feel their needs as your own needs, and you would have to be able to see the world through their eyes. Of course, you still wouldn’t escape from your own subjectivity. But it would become a subjectivity that embraces all other subjectivities as part of its own.

An awareness so expansive and sensitive would require such an enormous breadth of experience that it might not be practically attainable. But to attain it would be a total transformation. Your actions would arise not only from the self but also from the world as a whole. You would transcend yourself and your present existence. You would become an entirely new kind of being — a new form of life itself — unlike anything ever before seen.