Grandfathers I

For the past few days, I have felt overwhelming love and care above and beyond my normal emotional state. You are the reason.

I have seen you, see you now and will see you again. You are with me all the time in one form or another.

I keep telling myself that I am less than you but you tell me and make me feel otherwise.

All of these feelings, unsellable, unmarketable, take place in the midst of a commercial world. We cannot trade emotions or barter them for other non-emotional items. Every one of us owns our emotions, even if we let outside influences increase or decrease certain emotional states.

Why are you so important to me and vice versa? Why does my love of other humans have no bounds except when I let misguided others slip their negative emotional outbursts into my thoughts?

I have studied religious texts from around the world. I hold images in my thoughts of wise elders like Black Elk, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, Alex Haley, Jesus, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joseph Campbell, Joan of Arc, Gandhi (Mahatma and Indira), Desmond Tutu, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Elizabeth I, and Cyrus.

I hold to the tenet that time does not exist but I do not exist outside of time. In fact, I do not exist. Only you exist. I know myself only because I am made of everything that is not me which is made of you which is everything that is not you.

I live a life of luxury and always have because I have you to love. I loved you the moment I was conceived, receiving my continually-changing essence from you. I am your effervescence and you are mine.

Yet, because I am made of all of you, I am also made of your negative influences. So how do I take the advice of people like my sixth grade teacher, Miss Snow, and let my life be a sieve which holds only the good influences and lets the negative influences flow on through and out of me, so that I prevent me, myself and I from absorbing and passing negative influences on to others?

In that, I have to be my own wise elder, taking the images of my elders into account, letting go of the direct influences in this moment to see the universal image available to me. I meditate as I type, ignoring the parts of me that see this screen and the world around me, understanding that the path of wisdom I tread has opened up onto a cliff overlooking an ocean. A thin line separates the vast horizon of the ocean from the limitless sky. My rational training imagines the depth, width and volume of the ocean as well as the height of the atmosphere. I open my thoughts beyond what I see, expanding past the planet and its eternal circular path around a sun.

Life is a set of patterns, cycles, clashing and breaking apart, remixing and forming new cyclical patterns, always interjoined.

There is no such thing as good, bad, positive or negative. It is all the same, the forming or reforming of patterns. I must get beyond the labels of death and life and see unity. That is what my elders' wisdom represents. We are all in this human condition together. There is no heaven or hell, no devil or angel, no yin or yang, no male or female. We are being and nonbeing at the same time.

Therefore, emotions do not exist and I am not influenced by negative or positive beings. I am neither and both. I am not overwhelmed by emotions of loving and caring. Instead, I am free of feelings altogether. I have reached the state where I am free to be me, a temporary confluence of you who are all the not-mes/not-yous around me.

I am me because I rediscover myself in what you do everyday. We can pay attention to one another or ignore each other - it is all the same. We exist. The one who wrote this and those who read this are humans but all of us exist, including the ones who have no comprehension of these words, like the table lamp, wall, window, tea, pen, gnat, moth, spider, bird, tree, road, power pole, sun, cloud, sky, air, moisture, humidity, quark, chlorophyll, clock and any other label we want to give to the parts of our existence that are me or not-me at the same time.

I use a common human language to express these thoughts and use my body which was born on a specific place of this planet which always proves I am still just this one person but that is all right because it is acceptable to embrace one's human condition. Some of us will starve to death before our fifth birthday. Some of us will live more than one hundred years. Some of us will purposefully kill others. Some of us will sacrifice our lives to save others.

I follow my elders and understand a little more about the phrase, γνῶθι σεαυτόν, or "Know thyself – and you shall know all the mysteries of the gods and of the universe."

I will tell a story or two in the next blog entry.