Concave, Convex

Based on the emails I receive from readers, I have formed an image of the type of person who reads this blog, makes the decision to write an email, and then actually sends me an email. Based on the letters I've received from those who took the extra step to discover my mailing address, I have an even clearer image of the type of reader who's willing to expose his/her handwriting and thus my glimpse into your personality.

I don't know the rest of you. I can set up a series of lenses in the backyard, focusing and unfocusing the sun's rays, seeing the effects on leaves and dirt, but I can't tell you in a few words what my backyard is. Okay, I take that back. My property is my oasis. I stood in the middle of the trees, vines, birds, squirrels and all the other woodland life this morning and filled my body with indescribable energy. The energy felt the same no matter whether I stood on the street, on my driveway, my front yard, front deck, or backyard. I didn't care about words. I didn't think about caring. I existed. Simplicity.

Your life is action. My life often involves action. My being only exists during meditation. Today, I can say I existed. Lately, I have not existed as much as I've wanted to. That's the source of my frustration, letting others drag me into their lives so they can prove to themselves they're important to me even when some of them know I think my life is much more important to me than theirs. But we're all the same, even when I want to think we're different. Desiring simplicity in a complex world. Wanting to feel important.

I stood in the shower this morning and thought about all the people who want to discover more about our universe - designing, building and sending probes into the solar system - and wonder why, when I had the chance to work on the space shuttle the rest of my life, I left that job because the management there told me they liked my potential and wanted me to work 50-60 hours a week. I discovered that some people dedicate their thoughts, both waking and dreaming, to pure understanding, putting one thing and one thing only in their sight. I already have my one thing - me. It's all I ever needed to be happy.

So why do I let myself get dragged into other people's lives? For instance, I didn't ask for or in any way request an audience with the hiring manager(s) at my current place of employment. Instead, I appeared as a guest speaker one evening and impressed one of the managers, who in turn requested a copy of my resume. They initiated the interview process with me, asking if I'd be interested in working for them. Because I believe I am important enough not to have to over-emphasize my personality to others, I stepped onto the conveyor belt that led me to working by teaching.

This blog is a dangerous device. It inflates my ego when others respond to what I write when it's only supposed to serve as a universal Internet access portal to my online journal. I can only ever be important to me. If I am important to others, then they are letting themselves be less important to themselves. Those who demand my attention are trying to lessen my self-importance but instead lessen my respect for their own self-importance or self-image, even if they have valid "mental" reasons for their demands, including recent loss of family members or friends and the desire to reach out for help.

When I am truly important to myself, I am invisible. Egoless. I may be picked up by the wind and get blown away. I will have no input to receive or output to give. This morning, such a moment of self-importance erased my personality traits for a moment. To repeat an overused phrase, I was one with the universe. Or rather, I was unaware of myself existing separately from the universe. I had no self. I understood infinity.

I spent most of last year in that state of mind. I looked forward to being or nonbeing like that for the rest of my life. Instead, I find I am still in demand by others. I have let myself get sucked back into the working world, with the daily ebb and flow of human needs. While in this working state, I offer advice to those in their mixed-up self-importance when I see they are reaching levels that I already achieved but I do not want a life of giving advice, despite the admonition from others that it's my responsibility as a person of my being to bring others enlightenment. I disagree - it is far better to discover enlightenment alone - but at the same time I can be wrong. I don't care. My way is not your way. I am childless and thus futureless. I have no time left and all the time in the world. I am outside and inside, left and right, and nowhere at the same time.

I would say that I appreciate the attention that the readers of this blog have given me but I would be lying. My life is a journey, not a destination. I want to live only with myself in every moment. I do not mind you walking beside me but I do not want to know you're there. We can cross paths, that's okay, because randomness must include bumping into others without premonition occasionally, but let's try to stay apart and not get attracted by our uniqueness or the strength of our personalities.

I am a middle-aged, overweight, male human animal, who has traveled over part of the planet on which I was born. I know nothing. I only exist part of the time I'm alive. I think I'm alive because of thought conditioning. I accept randomness because I want no destination to obscure the time I spend with myself. I have no goals or objectives. I have limits that I neither accept nor reject because thinking about them does not change their boundaries. I will die and will never have lived. I will disappear while remaining visible forever. The hair on the floor that fell out of a follicle on my arm is me and not me. The skin on my face that I washed off while bathing in a shower in Ennis, County Clare, Ireland, three years ago, lodged itself in a gap between pipes underneath a street and gave life to a microscopic creature I never met. My life is not my own. I am a temporary collection of minerals, always flowing into and out of a set of orifices and membranes made of minerals that hold in or hold back minerals while processing other minerals. Everything else is a mirage. I do not exist. I exist when I do not exist.

All the things we do to pretend we exist, to give ourselves a sense of self-importance, is superfluous. I cannot change your perception of this self-deception. You will figure this out on your own when or if you want to. Others will want you to participate in their self-deception. You will want others to participate in your self-deception. Self-importance is only a collection of characters or letters or hieroglyphs or images.

Every living thing exists. No living thing has a right to exist. No living thing has a right to not exist. No one has a right to take away another living thing's existence. But we do it all the time. We step on ants, kill mosquitoes, run over roadside animals and wish other humans out of existence. Every one of us, by virtue of being born, will ourselves to continue living. Find room to accommodate every living thing, including every human animal around you. We have value simply by being. When you use words or phrases that qualify another person's existence, you qualify your own existence. In other words, when you praise another person's accomplishments or put down another person because of physical differences (color, race, distinguishing features, speech patterns, etc.), you change your self-importance, too.

I have no answers. I only have my self. These words are lies that tell the truth. These words come from the body that doesn't exist but has emotional states that include the desire for fame, fortune, sexual trysts and other animal behaviors. There is no truth. There are no hidden conspiracies, only those who pretend to have hidden truths that truly don't exist. There is only the interaction of minerals. You think you're reading these words and have value. You do not exist. Neither does anyone else. Don't give others self-importance when they don't give you yours. Give others more self-importance than they need. It doesn't matter.

Today, I was invisible for a few human seconds and loved myself for the absence of my self. Nothing else matters. Especially not you. The only way I can tell you you're important is to tell you to go away because you're not important to me. One day you'll understand, and if you don't, it doesn't matter. You have to live with yourself, I don't. I have to live with myself, you don't. When I write in this blog, I only see a reflection of myself because it's a mirror with only my image in it. You only think you see yourself because you think you're important. See what I mean?