Do you exist on a level that has no identifiers? Or are you, like some traveler’s suitcase, covered with appliques and stickers that indicate not only where you have been, but also how the places of your life identify you? Even the most stay-at-home people among us are travelers of sorts, doing that traveling through what we have read or observed or through what others have taught or told us.
The question is as old as philosophy and religion. How do we identify ourselves as individuals when we are enveloped by others and possibly an Other (some Universal Principle, Infinite Being, or Being Itself)? To what level of simplicity can we reduce ourselves, especially in light of all those places whose stickers mark us?
Mystics might offer clues to simplification, but short of our own mystical experience we have no way of immersing ourselves in their mysticism. If we do achieve that immersion, doesn’t it just become another suitcase sticker? You and I do not exist in some definable vacuum. Like the universe filled with undetectable Dark Matter we are filled with much that is indefinable and often, if not always, undetectable. Can you and I see inside a closed suitcase?
If you and I have difficulty determining our “pure essence,” can we determine it for others? No, of course not. Yet, daily most of us believe we can see what is inside the suitcases of those around us. We simply look at the stickers on the baggage of their lives and use those indicators to tell us what’s inside.
The question is as old as philosophy and religion. How do we identify ourselves as individuals when we are enveloped by others and possibly an Other (some Universal Principle, Infinite Being, or Being Itself)? To what level of simplicity can we reduce ourselves, especially in light of all those places whose stickers mark us?
Mystics might offer clues to simplification, but short of our own mystical experience we have no way of immersing ourselves in their mysticism. If we do achieve that immersion, doesn’t it just become another suitcase sticker? You and I do not exist in some definable vacuum. Like the universe filled with undetectable Dark Matter we are filled with much that is indefinable and often, if not always, undetectable. Can you and I see inside a closed suitcase?
If you and I have difficulty determining our “pure essence,” can we determine it for others? No, of course not. Yet, daily most of us believe we can see what is inside the suitcases of those around us. We simply look at the stickers on the baggage of their lives and use those indicators to tell us what’s inside.
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