sentience vs non sentience

I remember the first time I heard the term ‘npc’. I didn’t know what it meant, and my friend described how it was people who were more like video game characters than real people. I still didn’t know who fit the bill and who didn’t.

Since then, I have heard people and even myself describe people as ‘non-sentient’. Even recently, I made a tweet about someone reminding me that lots of people are non-sentient, which was mostly a joke but still a truth I found at the time compelling. I have known many people now who I could see as somehow not as present or as ‘real’ as me. But I saw another tweet about how narcissistic it is to call others non-sentient, to which I found compelling. How do I know who and who isn’t really living? On what grounds do I have to judge others as less ‘alive’ than myself? At the time when someone told me this recently, I had stopped talking to someone I had chatted with quite a bit online until they basically just stopped talking to me. I found their behavior surprising and was taken aback by it. Why did they not have the time or energy to share with me anymore? It was like this person just wasn’t there on some level, which gave me mental permission in that moment to decide they just weren’t sentient, or as aware as myself.

I’ve been thinking about this now, about how who is and who could not be sentient, and I have concluded that it is impossible for us to know. Even the most stuck in themselves person is experiencing a consciousness, is living an experience, that I don’t know but that is still valid for them. If God is the bringer of life, and the spirit of life itself, would it be people closest to him who have the most sentience? I think maybe that could be so. We all live on some level in the dark to his love and his truth, but the closer we come, the more he reveals the truth of things to us. We are often forgetting how loved we are, how loved we all are, in him. We are often for searching for things in the world, and in each other, that can only be found in him. We forget him, and in doing so, forget the basics of who we are, of who others are, and what this life means. We all need his light to illuminate our shadows, to pierce our hearts and to bring awareness of righteous truth into our lives.

So in conclusion, I think we need God to be more sentient, but that we already are. And I don’t think we have any right or ability to know the sentience of the people around us, and we should assume that they are present, conscious, and awake. Assuming the people we disagree with or don’t understand have less ‘sentience’ than us is, I believe, a narcissistic and inaccurate claim. We are all alive, and becoming more alive as we seek the author and source of life itself.