Universally Human
There are many ways to deepen our realization of the universally human - that what is expressed and comes through this particular human self is just one variation of the universally human theme.
The Byron Katie inquiries seems to be good at revealing the universality of what happens when there is a belief in certain thoughts.
And yesterday during the deeksha event, we did another form of inquiry. In groups of two, we asked each other repeatedly "what do you hope I will see about you" and then "what do you fear I will see about you". In my dyad, what came up for each of us was very similar, and we overheard nearby groups coming up with very similar qualities as well.
It was a good lesson in the universally human. This is how the mind functions when expressed through a contemporary human being in our western culture, and filtered through a sense of "I".
The particular content will of course vary some with different cultures, but the patterns and processes are most likely the same. There is a sense of "I", a belief in an overlay of polarities, value judgments added to these polarities, and then an individual and collective (cultural) repression and hiding of certain characteristics and enhancement and display of other.
We fracture the world through the belief in abstractions in general, and in the idea of "I" in particular, and this fracture goes through our culture and each one of us as individuals.
And through seeing this, we can learn to more consciously hold the polarities, to bring the whole polarity into awareness and see that this is what it means to be human. We are good and also bad, we are kind and also cruel, we love and we also hate, we are sincere and also dishonest, and that is all OK.
And through bringing it all more into awareness, we can learn to relate to it all with more awareness. We are released from being at the mercy of repressed qualities coming out uncontrollably during stress or in the form of blind shadow projections and dehumanization of the "other".
It all arises from the one groundless ground that the whole world of phenomena arises from and as. It is all the many faces of what is - of what we call God, Buddha Mind, Brahman, Tao, Spirit.