Our behavior in this world is greatly determined by how we come to perceive physical reality through our experiences.  Our awareness of that place we've come to call physical reality begins when we're thrust into it at birth.  From then on through experience our awareness of it all continues to unfold and expand to varying degrees until our death.  The dilemma is that physical reality doesn't stand still, but is continually in unstoppable flux.  We all face the tendency of getting stuck in a particular reality mode of perception which slows down or stops the growth in our understanding of ourselves and of our relationship to our continually changing surroundings.

The objective mode:  At birth we started to experience the hardness quality of physical reality.  As we develop we slowly become aware of a material environment of objects and forms.  We begin to develop a sense of separation between our individual selves as object from all other objects that surrounds us.  We start to classify and group everything into categories.  For example, in regards to humans we eventually begin to perceive individuals as fat, thin, tall, blond, bearded, etc.

The psychological mode:  In this mode of awareness we start to perceive personality differences between our individual selves.  Besides experiencing individuals as different types of physical bodies, we start sensing humans with particular emotional behavioral attributes or qualities such as happy, sad, achiever, anxious, neurotic, depressed, enthusiastic, etc.  While experiencing this mode we're too busy with the psychology of personality differences to notice the bodies as purely changing physical forms. 

The opinionated mode:  In this mode of perception we start to stereotype individuals by making sweeping assumptions about them.  We start to pigeon hole physical and personality differences into types; into set categories.  We use apparent stereotypes to verbally communicate our generalized personal opinions of certain kinds of individuals such as "she's a bleeding heart," or "he's a redneck," etc.  This is a new game of experiencing individual differences.  We start lumping individuals into generalized mythic type realities.  This mode tends to skew our awareness away from sensing the real basic essence of physical reality as a teaching or instructive activity.

The similarity mode:  In this mode of awareness we begin to move beyond the perception of differences to perceiving similarities between us; the qualities of sameness.  Now when we look into another person's eyes what we start to see is another person just like us looking back at us.  We begin to see another perceiving aware entity trapped inside the illusion of differences.  The eyes, the windows of the soul, meet, and we say, "are you in there?  I'm in here.  How did you get into that one?  What's it like being in there?"  We start becoming aware of our predicament.  We normally respond to each other as a separate body and personality but in reality we begin to realize that we are all caught in the same boat made of the same stuff and experience the same pleasures and pains.  We begin to sense that we are all fused together in one single reality; that you are part of me just as my arm is part of my body and vice versa.

The oneness mode:  Two people looking at each other is like two mirrors facing each other with nothing in between.  It's itself, looking at itself looking at itself looking…  In that reality there is only one of us here.  The one is appearing to be the many in order to play out the experiential game of life.  We tend to get lost in the many but in reality there is only one of us.  The moment, like the mirror, contains the many, but there is only one moment.  Every mode of awareness up to this point is an equally valid perception.  All are real, but only relatively real.  While you sit here reading this material you think it real. But is it any more or less real than the reality that there is only one of us reading itself?