The Diving Suit Theory
What if we are one consciousness experiencing life through billions of different bodies?
By Glacia Rah
I had a realization today.
What if we have misunderstood the human experience entirely?
What if we are not as separate as we believe ourselves to be? What if, beneath our different bodies, colours, cultures and religions, we are fundamentally one consciousness, experiencing physical existence in different forms, all at once?
Imagine wanting to explore the ocean.
You cannot simply descend into its depths and experience everything it has to offer. You need equipment. You need a diving suit, a mask, an oxygen tank. You need something that allows you to enter an environment you otherwise could not experience in the same way.
So you put on your gear, and you dive.
You see the fish. You feel the water. You discover the beauty of an entirely different world. You experience things you could never have experienced without the equipment.
Now imagine another diver entering the same ocean.
Their suit is a different colour. Their equipment looks different. Perhaps their body is larger or smaller than yours.
But does that make them fundamentally different from you?
Does the colour of their diving suit make their experience more valuable than yours?
Of course not.
The suit is simply the equipment. The experience is the reason you entered the ocean.
And suddenly I wondered whether the human body might be understood in exactly the same way.
What if our bodies are the suits we wear to experience physical existence?
Different skin colours. Different appearances. Different abilities. Different places of birth.
Different ways of experiencing the same extraordinary world.
And what if the consciousness beneath all these differences is ultimately one?
Not millions of entirely separate beings, but one consciousness experiencing existence through billions of perspectives simultaneously.
We are born into the world, and we begin our dive.
We touch. We taste. We hear. We see. We create music. We fall in love. We laugh until we cry. We discover mountains, forests, oceans and stars.
We experience the warmth of another person's embrace.
We experience joy, grief, wonder, fear, hope and everything in between.
And yet, somewhere along the way, we begin fighting over the suits.
We fight over skin colour. We fight over religion. We fight over ethnicity, nationality and the many identities we have created.
We convince ourselves that one suit is superior to another.
We divide ourselves into teams, much like players wearing different jerseys on a sports field. We become so attached to our colours that we begin to forget the humanity beneath them.
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But when the game ends, the jerseys come off.
The players are human beings again.
Perhaps we were never truly different in the ways that mattered most.
This does not mean our differences are meaningless. The bodies we inhabit and the societies we live in shape our experiences. Some people are treated unjustly because of the colour of their skin or the circumstances of their birth. Those realities matter, and they deserve to be challenged.
But none of those differences makes one life inherently worth more than another.
And perhaps this is where we have lost our way.
We came to experience the ocean, but we became obsessed with comparing diving suits.
Imagine how much of life we miss while arguing about whose equipment is better.
Imagine the beauty we overlook.
The love we refuse to give.
The people we never get to know.
The experiences we deny ourselves and one another.
All because we have mistaken the suit for the one wearing it.
In my spiritual understanding, death is simply the end of the diving session.
The physical body has served its purpose.
The suit comes off.
The experience of being physical ends, and consciousness returns to what it has always been.
I cannot prove that this is what happens after death. But it is a way of understanding existence that feels deeply meaningful to me.
And if we really are one consciousness experiencing itself through different bodies, then perhaps loving another person is also a way of loving ourselves.
Perhaps causing suffering to another is, in some deeper sense, causing suffering to another expression of the same existence.
Perhaps we are here not to conquer one another, but to experience the extraordinary possibility of being alive.
So explore the ocean.
Travel. Create. Love. Learn. Laugh. Feel the rain. Listen to music. Watch the sunrise. Hold someone's hand. Discover things you never knew existed.
Stand against injustice, but do not let hatred consume the time you have been given.
Let other people explore the ocean too.
Their dive does not need to look like yours.
And when the diving session finally ends, imagine removing the suit, returning to whatever we truly are, carrying the wonder of everything we have experienced.
And saying:
"Now, wasn't that a marvellous experience?"
— Glacia Rah
