Being human

Hello everyone, nice to see you on this Saturday night.

As the days keep on passing, and I absorb more and more information from around me, I get more and more of a sense that there is so much I have to learn, things that I feel I should have learned at a much younger age. I have noticed a change in other areas as well, if it's only in my own perceptions of the situations as they are.

One thing I've realized is that there is so much about myself I didn't know, and that in and of itself is strange to me, because after all, I'm like everyone else, I have to live with myself every single hour of every day, you'd think me and "me" would be well acquainted. Truth is, as I have eluded to in previous posts, until very recently I lived and thought with the mind of someone else, always thinking and doing and even having opinions based on what I thought others wanted me to think, or what others wanted me to do. I won't go into a long drawn out explanation of why, as I have addressed it before. What surprises me most about this "getting to know me" thing is twofold.

First, the shock of realizing that I'm really meeting a new person here, someone who was with me all along, but who I knew little about, just seems so alien to me. I want to ask myself "Who are you, and what have you been doing just sitting there in my head all my life"? It's a really strange thing to me, I'm too old for this, how in the world did I make it to the age of 39 without thinking with my own mind? Is that even possible? I guess so, because I've managed to accomplish it.

Secondly, having my own mind has brought with it a kind of confusion, now I second guess my own thoughts, I think to myself, "Am I thinking this because of what someone else expects, or is this really me?" It feels a lot like my brain is trying to rewire itself, not physically maybe, but certainly from a consciousness standpoint, I'm installing a new "filter", one that is screening out thoughts I would have previously accepted as my own, but were in fact motivated by what I perceived as what someone else wished me to think. It's hard to explain, but for instance, if someone said to me "Do you want to go to (insert restaurant name here) or would you rather stay home?", my thought process did not automatically engage in deciding what "I" wanted to do, but rather with what that person wanted or expected, or wanted to hear. And then agonizing over whether the decision I made would ultimately make them happy or angry or otherwise indifferent. Intertwined with that however, now that I think about it, was my actual self's thoughts of what I wanted to do, but those thoughts were filtered out in favor of that person's expectations, perceived or otherwise, that I had in mind at the time.

Anyway, over the last few months, as I have walked my path, I have developed a system of beliefs all my own, and they are probably not like anyone else's. Which is fine, I can accept that now, I don't have to believe JUST like anyone else. Even if everyone else on the planet thinks those beliefs are wrong.

Many pagans believe in a god and/or goddess, much like many of the other "mainstream" religions, but it is my belief that while they do exist, I don't see them as "gods", but merely another type of lifeform in this thing we call the universe. They are energy beings, not physical, like human beings, and I also believe there are many "species" of energy beings, or to put it another way, energy beings in various states of evolution. This is where we come in as humans. We are a mechanism, a way certain energy beings use to be able to experience and learn things that they cannot do in their natural state. We are those energy beings, but in human form, and as such, we cannot comprehend or even have knowledge of our "natural" state, other than to have a rudimentary perception of it. The reason for this is surprisingly simple. To be fully aware of the "other" existence, and the nature of what it is like, would absolutely spoil the ability to exist in a physical form. Having intimate knowledge of that existence would make living in a "crude" human body seem like nothing more than wearing a "costume", as one would always see the physical world as an illusion. As an energy being, the rules of time, space, and what is "real" are much different than they are for a physical being. We in the physical world are bound by constraints such as a perception of time that is only linear, one moment following the next. An energy being has no such limitations, and can view time in many different ways. As humans we are physically incapable of comprehending anything but linear time, which I believe is "built in" to prevent us from perceiving things outside of this physical form. As an energy being the concept of location is also vastly different. We see things as "up" or "down" or "here" or "there", but a being of energy doesn't have the same perception at all. The phrase I have heard over and over again in researching and reading about spiritual things and accounts from those who have spoken to these beings is that they say  "I am everywhere and nowhere". I take that to mean that what we see as the certain place that we are right this moment is not "where" they are too, to them, "where" doesn't exist. It's a little difficult to wrap one's mind around a concept like that, how can someone not be "here" if they are right in front of us talking to us?

It's my belief that we are here, on this planet, as energy beings having a human experience. Those that are our guides, the spiritual beings, help us to accomplish whatever it is we chose for ourselves before we got here. To that end, I believe that those beings do not ask or require of us to worship them, as we are much like they are, only a little less "evolved" so to speak. I also believe that nothing happens by chance, or by accident, and that even things that seem insignificant can be very important in the grand scheme of things. I view life as an opportunity to grow, it's a special thing indeed to be here, now, doing what I'm doing. There's something to be learned from the experience of being human, and the opportunities to learn in everyday life are not to be squandered, for there is a finite amount of those opportunities we are each given with each life we live. And yes, I believe that we have more lives to live, and have lived many more before this one, well, some of us anyway. Even if we have lived several lives, or hundreds of lives, this one is unique, and can never be duplicated. It's all in what we chose or choose to do, we pick the lives we want to live, and "sit out" other times, and just observe. While we're here though, it behooves us to make the best of the life we have.

These are just a few paragraphs on what I believe. There is so much more that I feel in my heart that is true, but it would take a novel to fully explain it all. For now let it suffice to say that this is how "I" believe; how you believe may be completely different, and that's ok, you are entitled to believe differently, you are not me. The possibilities of existence are infinite, and the things that can be learned from experiencing those infinite possibilities is just staggering, there is so much to learn, and that, I believe, is the purpose of existence. Interesting tidbit of recursion, don't you think? We exist to learn, we learn to exist. To learn, to grow, to change. That's the one true constant in the universe, change. How we choose to learn is also limitless in its possibilities, it's part of the change, and maybe that's part of why we are human, to be diverse in our pursuit of knowledge, to look at the universe from many different angles, from different points of view, to say "what if".

Here's to being human.