What is being sentient like for you?

Over the last 18 months, because of the institution I live in, I have come in contact with many people with various levels of awareness and physical mobility, to say nothing of psychological functioning. All this has me reevaluating the presumption that all human beings share essentially the same "Sentient reality".

My own personal sense of self sits, dead centre in my head and radiates outward. Now, to make matters even more interesting, perhaps because I have a physical disability since childbirth, I tend to treat my limbs in the third person. "The legs", "The arms", and so forth. This is especially true when I was a child and ofcourse posed some problems, because it allowed me to rationalize things being up beyond my control. Slowly over time the various body parts have indeed become more integrated and not thought of as separate components. Still though, in times is duress the old habits reemerge and I have to consciously bring myself back together.

Throughout my day as I deal with people and observe them in various situations I find myself asking "What is their reality-what is being human for them-and what is their experience? "Anyone who is been through trauma of any sorts or indeed fallen in love knows how the world can appear instantaneously different, as though you were a different animal. Perhaps we are more different than we know, and the cause of some of our problems is that we don't acknowledge and make room for the differences.

Take, what I believe are, to very different people who presumably experience the world dramatically differently:

1. Pres. Donald Trump and;
2. Prof. Stephen Hawking.

Aside from the obvious differences, of which there are many, the essence of their realities must be vastly different  One would presume that the two minds worked fundamentally differently. Just how far did this difference go? Did it reach beyond the intellectual level, down to the way they both interfaced with the world? I believe so and this is what I find fascinating. Do these two minds work fundamentally differently, to such an extent that the experience of the world for each person would be different. Yet because we cannot plug into each other's head (yet) humanity has no way of confirming whether any existence is different from another.

Even subtle differences which are hard to quantify may combine to create for each individual a unique reality. Which because it is the only one they know, they never question that others may not experience things in the same way. We all just presume that the basic concepts of living in a 3D space are the same for everyone. And of course it goes far beyond that level of the physical to the very way people think, the process involved in making up a thought. Talk about going down the rabbit hole! :-). If we examine it closely, we may not even agree on what the "hole" is, to say nothing of the rabbit.

So my question to you is:

What is being sentient like for you? Does the above text make sense to you, or is your experience entirely different? Leave a comment below and let us know.