How we decide to see ourselves

 

It’s as though I have been possessed by very different entities with very different minds throughout my life. Some of them I can recall, i.e. I can remember how they felt, what they thought. Others I can only see and watch in a kind of wonder that I could have been that person. But I was. I sit here remembering such things, trying to somehow put it all together as me, as my life. Some memories are absolutely pleasant, while others are surreal. Like Nikki and I played together in an innocence, though we could never have related, or I could never have related as one in a marriage relationship. I just wasn’t there yet; I was fully within what could be called spiritual fantasies, the archetype of the mystic monk or even the fool, the simpleton.

 

I sit here hoping to glimpse “my true nature,” in which I want to be “at ease with myself” since this is what I “really am.” Too often, I experience an enormous, overpowering underflow of sorrow or rage or sheer lostness and disconnectedness, though not chaos. And I think that this must be “me.” But it is not. I am something other than that; I am a thread of awareness that extends out beyond the boundaries of the universe itself. I am elementized as a characteristic peace that is universal, permeating all things. Sometimes I discover myself within this great contextual matrix of peace. It is not an oppositional, dualistic quality to be held in contrast to “war or chaos.” I do not know if it is any kind of “order.” It seems to simply hold everything there is within itself, the best and the worst. When I sit here sometimes, seeking to experience my “true nature,” I find myself “at peace and ease,” and then determine that this much be “it.” I figure that the problem with that is that the whole series of appearances of “true nature” runs before me like a moving picture and then I pick the few cuts from the film that I would like to identify “my true self” with and as, leaving the rest on the editing room floor, as it were; as if they were underserving of being recognized as part of “the show of my true nature.” I had forgotten how Nikki and I played together all the time like little kids sharing the fantastic moment, though in a kind of never-never land, which is problematic in the world of ever-ever land. I never considered that all my “negative” thoughts were part and parcel of the whole program of my life. One wants to choose only the good parts to see and identify with; never the embarrassing, shameful, regretful parts. And we have to create a God to forgive us those parts since we won’t even accept them as part and parcel of ourselves, our actual lives. We imprison ourselves by walling ourselves away from all our mistakes, which makes us smaller and smaller and smaller.