How you are Different From, and also Exactly like, Everyone Else

Human beings are all the same. 

We are also extremely different.

See, all humans have the same basic nature. We’re working from one universal operating system, just like 1000 people who have a brand new iphone. Before pictures, apps, and downloads start happening, those 1000 phones are the same. Fresh out of the box, humans are largely the same too.

When we’re in a nice, peaceful feeling without a lot on our minds, we are like those phones fresh out of the box. We are living from our shared, basic nature. That commonplace, peaceful feeling is human home base; it’s our human operating system.

When we relax into our nature, we are just like everyone else. And you know it, don’t you? You see similarities far more than differences. You get along with everyone. You help others and you feel more deeply.

You feel connected and closer to home.

Within minutes of leaving the Apple store, those new iphones are filled with added, programmed, extraneous stuff that suddenly makes them different from each other.

Of course, they are only superficially different. If you wiped them clear of the programming you’d see that their basic nature hasn’t changed at all. Their basic nature can’t change, no matter what extraneous stuff gets added.

But on the surface, those iphones look different. Dissimilarities are obvious. They can all do different things, make different sounds, and function in unique ways.

Same with humans.

When we are lost in our own busy heads, thinking our own subjective thoughts, we see differences. The people around us look more like “them” than “us”. We feel more separate, as if we’re on our own, it’s us against the world, and no one truly understands us.

We’re caught up in our superficial uniqueness and it hides our fundamental sameness.

We get carried away by all of those icons…the ones for this program and that program. We focus on the programs we have versus the ones everyone else has, and we lose sight of the operating system that makes those apps and downloads possible.

Another way of saying this as it relates to people rather than iphones, is this: on your best day, you are infinitely more similar to all other humans than you are different. And you are far more similar to all other humans on your best day than you are on your worst day.

On your worst day, when you’re caught up in the surface waves of your very independent-looking life, you feel like an island.

You aren’t an island, but it looks that way through the fog of all of that thinking. When your thinking clears, the factory default setting are restored and you catch a glimpse of oneness again.