MORE THAN THE SUM OF MY PARTS

I just woke up with a question in my head: Are we really satisfied being the people we seem to be born to be? I cannot answer this question for anyone but me: No! I am not!

This is not the question I wanted to ask when I started this series of posts, in fact I was not intending to write more than one post. But as I explained to a blogger friend of mine, when I start to write something, anything, I really do not know what I am going to write. I have an idea, or maybe I should say an idea comes to me, and I let it grow from there. My typing finger starts hitting keys, and I watch as words form on the screen. Some people might call that automatic writing, but I do not. I just call it being a conduit for my spirit to talk to me. While I do publish, Word Press style, these writings where others can read them, I do that not to teach anyone anything. To me, as I have said in a previous post, trying to teach someone something is a crime against their humanity, as well as an insult to their being. No one knows what it is someone else needs to learn. Oh, you can teach someone how to talk, how to write, how to do mathematics, those are the tools of human communication, we need those to function in a society, to function as a society. But beyond that, trying to teach others who they are, or what they are, is something no one can know for anyone else. I do not know what you need to be you!

However, that does not stop me from telling you how I came to be me. And I came to be me, not by listening to others, but by learning to be the person it makes me happy to be. By looking inside myself, at myself, I came to understand I did not always like the person I found myself to be. At that time I realized I had a decision to make: I could go on being that person anyway, or I could change myself to be someone I could not only love, but someone I like. I have to live with myself for the entire extent of my life, therefore only I can be my best friend, so why would I want to be friends with someone I don’t always like? It makes more sense to me to be someone I want to spend my whole life with.

Hopefully I am not telling you anything new, things that you have not already learned for yourself, but that did not come automatically to me. As a child, I had no idea I could be anyone but me. I was still discovering who I was, and I just took it for granted the person I was was me, and I could not change. As it was, as I was, I did not question myself. I absorbed being from all the people around me. I did not consider myself as someone I had to be around, I was already me. No, the people I was around most were my family, and I learned who I was by seeing myself through other people’s eyes. If you know anything about my history, which I make no pretense to hide, you know I grew up as a physically and mentally abused child. Nowadays I can see that I was also spiritually abused, but at that time I had no idea I even had a spirit. Me was just me. And me was told everyday of my life that I was useless, worthless, and a total failure by my dear loving sperm donor that told me he was my father. What the hell kind of a father does that to his own child? My father did it to eight of my siblings also. He would have done it to all ten of his offspring, but my little brother was born with Down Syndrome, which he blamed my mother for, and the poor kid was already worse off than my father could possibly make him. But this is not about Donny, or even about my father, it is about me. Everything is about me, right, like your life is all about you. Don’t bother answering that, it is not a real question; it is merely a figure of speech. Reality is I grew up seeing myself as my father told me I was, useless, worthless, and a total failure. Something had to change, or I would have had to kill myself. I had no value, why bother living?

But something inside said I had to have value, why else was I even born?

So I went in search of that something, and, again, if you know me, I believe I found myself, inside of myself! (And the only reason I use the word believe is because some of my readers do not believe there is a self to be found. As far as I am concerned I not only have a self, but that self is now me!) Further, this self I know is not a function of my ego, but a demonstration of my spirit (which has nothing to do with demons, lol).

But what is spirit?

The search for spirit is one of the reasons for this whole series of posts, starting from A Look Back, At The Start of Life. I want to discover whether, as some people believe, spirit, or soul as they call it, is a function of the human race, or a function of all life. If the first life on earth, the cells which are the building blocks of all life on earth, have spirit, then all life on earth has spirit. However, if all life does not have spirit, if the earliest life on earth does not have spirit, where did it come from, and at what point did it enter into the lives of living beings?

If you are a skeptic, you will see my obvious assumption, that there is a quality about us that can be called spirit. Not everyone believes there is. But, as I said, I have found my spirit inside of me, and therefore knowing how to recognize it, I have seen spirit in many other people around me. Spirit manifests in people as caring, or what some people might call empathy–the ability to see someone from their point-of-view as well as from our own point-of-view, the ability to feel their pain and suffering without filtering it through the filtering systems we have developed to see ourselves, accepting that others are not us, but still very much in relationship with us. The corollary question for me is, do we feel empathy only for our fellow humans, or do we feel empathy for all living beings? And can non-human beings feel empathy for us, and others?

This looks like a good resting point. A time for those who want to consider these questions for themselves, if they, you, want to consider them. Probably not everyone will.

Till next time…