photo by Maren Yumi
conversation log: 6469 New Calendar
It is inherently difficult, because of your language’s limitations, to articulate how this way of being is so different from yours. Your language, as your people have explained, evolved during your Time of Forgetting, and its terms, and its very structure, reflect that Forgetting. This — what you see as a tribe of people physically and behaviourally not unlike yourselves — no longer uses symbolic language. After the Remembering this no longer sees need for it. Body language, song, and demonstration are what this apparently uses to — how can this be explained? — to ‘be joyfully’.
The Forgetting, apparently, happens in situations of such distress to the energy of being that this ‘forgets’ that all there is is this. Individuals appear to ‘become’ separate and apart from this, ‘conscious’ of their selves as separate. That must be a terrible nightmare, a seemingly endless one, one that this cannot imagine. No surprise that each ‘separate’ individual becomes a creature of anger, fear, grief, anxiety and sadness; nor that they behave, individually and tribally, in such a fearful, insensitive and destructive way.
Please understand that this is not saying you and your tribe are wrong or stupid or inferior in any way — your behaviour is inevitable, as was ‘ours’ when ‘we’ thought ‘our’ selves separate, and you have each and all been doing your best given your terribly difficult situation. This is just saying that perhaps you might find yourselves Remembering.
Remembering is not something that this, or any one, can teach you; but it may happen nonetheless. If it happens it might be frightening, but it will also be unimaginably joyful. Remembering happened to each of ‘us’, and then, just as suddenly as ‘we’ became separate individuals, those separate selves vanished, and, since time is just an invention of the separate self, ‘we’ didn’t vanish in time — ‘we’ ‘suddenly’ never were. At least that is how it seems.
What is the point of saying this to you? There is no point. This cannot be or do other than what it apparently is and does. This is just a resonance, a “feeling with” you. Your lives seem so hard and so full of struggle and unhappiness. Somehow, this remembers that, too.
You are laughing — it does seem preposterous. How can this ‘remember’ or imagine being separate, having a separate self, if there is no ‘I’ to remember or imagine it, you ask? And what is this character apparently walking beside you if it is not a separate being? Excellent questions.
You may be disappointed to hear that the answer is that it’s a mystery. There is walking happening, and you apparently sense that it is you and a separate ‘me’ that are walking, here and now, but this has no such sense. There is just walking happening, wondrously, and not in any time or place, because time and place are just inventions, ideas of the brain that the separate self then identifies with.
This does not mean that you are hallucinating ‘me’. What the separate self perceives is absolutely real to you. This does not deny your reality. Your reality is included in everything that really is, though it is really a dream ‘you’ have constructed and are living, a dream that keeps ‘you’ from seeing everything that really is, behind the veil of the self.
How can this ‘know’? This doesn’t know. Only the separate self can ‘know’ something, a reality separate from itself. How can this remember believing in the reality of a separate self? This doesn’t know. It’s a mystery. A resonance.
Is this message that has just been conveyed to you just a rationalization, another invention, a convoluted wishful-thinking coping mechanism by a distraught self seeking to deny its selfhood, you wonder? This is also an excellent hypothesis. But what would the point of that be? It would be difficult to credibly sustain, and to overcome the cognitive dissonance it presents. It would be mean to those struggling with the suffering that accompanies belief in the reality of the separate self, to suggest, perhaps even while knowing it to be untrue, that all that suffering is unnecessary but that escaping the illusion is impossible, hopeless.
If you look at what you see as ‘people in the tribe you call Tsilga‘, you will see an equanimity, a joyousness, that you cannot observe in most members of tribes afflicted with the sense of an enduring, separate self. This is not an act. There is no ‘person’, no ‘tribe’, no thing, no one. There is just this, wondrous, astonishing apparent inexplicable everything.
You want to know what ‘I’ think you should do, could do, might helpfully do, for yourself, for ‘me’, for better understanding or communication, for ‘all our relations’. There is no ‘I’, no ‘me’, no you, no thing to do, no thing that can be done, no free will to do. There is only what is happening. It is amazing, complete, perfect. It is love. Perhaps when these two apparent bodies again seemingly meet, it will be selflessly. It will not necessarily be peaceful or joyful. But it will, once again, be awesome.
May it so be. May you Remember.
