Every time you look into the world, you are looking inside yourself. Let that sink in. Let it permeate your most stubborn assumptions that \u2018they\u2019 or \u2018it\u2019 is causing the way you feel right now. This information is incredibly freeing, though heavy at first, once we accept it, and fully understand it.<\/p>\n
You watch a dog leap into the air to catch a Frisbee at a park, frolicking with its owner on a clear, blue-sky day, and a huge smile creeps across your face. You created that experience. On the other hand, you have a long and tedious argument with a loved one over the same topic that seems to come up repeatedly, a broken record with no one willing or able to simply pick up the needle to place it on the vinyl in a location that will make music instead of a horrible, screeching noise, and it depletes you. You are sad and worried, and lonely. Though it is hard to acknowledge, you created that experience, too.<\/p>\n
How so? It all has to do with the fact that, as ancient spiritual teachings suggests, this world of experience is simply a holographic experience based on consciousness, or, as researchers have recently discovered in the field of neuroscience, it\u2019s the way your mirror neurons respond to the witnessing of events outside yourself.<\/p>\n
Mirror neurons are brain cells that respond the same when we perform an action or when we witness someone else perform the same action. They have been proposed to be the neuronal substrate underlying a vast array of different functions.<\/p>\n
Mirror neurons were first discovered in the early 1990s, when a team of Italian researchers found individual neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys that fired both when the monkeys grabbed an object and also when the monkeys watched another primate grab the same object, though they weren\u2019t doing anything.<\/p>