A few days back, I came across a video where I heard this beautiful insight (not able to get the link now)
"Imagine a large ocean full of water. That's universal consciousness. When we fill a bottle with water from the same ocean, the water inside the bottle is our individual consciousness. The bottle is our body that provides space for our individual consciousness to reside. When we eventually depart, the bottle is opened and the water gets released back to the ocean."
As I pondered over this, it made sense to expand on this further.
Imagine this bottle to be a transparent one made with glass.
As we grow up, we associate with identities or labels. These get stuck on the transparent walls of the bottle, preventing us from seeing the Universal consciousness that we all are part of.
We enter adulthood, adding more and more labels to our bottles. Some of those labels are easy to remove with little effort. But for those identities with which we associate strongly, the glue becomes tighter, making it harder to remove the labels.
When we are unable to remove a label stuck to a new bowl, what do we do? We end up applying heat which loosens the glue. The label comes off easily after a few minutes of heat.
Similarly, for our identity labels that are hard to remove, heat comes in the form of sudden, unexpected challenges and obstacles from the Universe. It is painful to experience this heat but is necessary to remove the label.
As the label gets removed one after another, the transparency of the bottle brings new sights and fresh perspectives. We start connecting the dots together. We go on a journey within to understand the similarities, although the bottles are in various shapes and sizes.
During this journey, it is imperative that we don't end up adding further new labels that hide our vision. The journey itself can result in new labels being created, with a stronger glue that will be harder to remove.
We need to be mindful of the fact that every bottle goes through his/her own unique journey to merge with the ocean. No journey is superior or inferior. There is no competition here. It is not a ladder where someone who started this journey many years back considers himself/herself superior. A better comparison would be a maze with multiple doors - someone opens 100 doors to get to the exit whereas another gets to open only 10 doors to get to the exit.
I might be completely wrong in my interpretation here. If you have a different perspective, I'd love to hear.
P.S. It is a strange irony that I wrote about finding your slashes (ensemble of avatars) in Sep 2016. Well, unlearning is a part of everyone's journey. And I accept the perspective that made sense back then and now welcoming this change in perspective as well.