Read the Full Series • Immortality Unleashed
In the beginning, or what seems like the beginning, you are thrilled to be out there, making your presence felt, or what feels like your presence. After much practice you have achieved what the guidance predicted. You are almost ecstatic and only just restrain yourself from telling the world, the one that is full of friends and strangers. Maybe it’s wiser to keep such accomplishments to yourself for a while. Later in the apparent passage of time you move out there again and discover the courage to push beyond.
You find yourself somewhere else, and see yourself doing things that you’d only read about. Later still you interact with other beings, some who notice you, some who argue with you and others who ignore you. Later you ask questions and get puzzling answers from folk whom seem preoccupied and evasive. These activities seem to stir up previously unknown parts of your personality, leading you to question the concept of yourself, the one you’d known since childhood. These new attributes and tendencies, once confronted, can make you feel like a stranger to yourself.
Later again you begin to suspect there’s more than one of you engaged in this quest as when you return to home base there seems to be several memories juggling for prominence, like children insisting on your attention and then slinking away when they fail to get it. You feel much too sane to be losing your balance, so how else to explain the multiplicity of mysteries? Your guidance insists that it’s all part of the journey and that all things must pass. Does that mean your sense of self must also pass?
As your interactions on your mystery flights increase in variety you see how you are becoming an actor with many roles to play. The you that you love and love to hate is merely one actor who took the reins years before birth and family found you a role. All these other yous, the actors temporarily inhabiting the roles all the situations require, they are, or are becoming, the many faces of self.
Is it possible, thinks the you that is wondering, that none of these roles are actually you? That there is no you behind the masks? An intelligence perhaps, an understanding, but no permanent personality as your place in life insists? Though fearful of casting off your precious identity, lest you become nobody, you inch towards that new definition, gradually growing the enigmatic grin that you have seen on statues and paintings of the revered prophets and teachers.
And if there is no you behind your actions, is there also no you inside all the beings you encounter? What a marvellously strange and wonderful idea! Of course it has no palpable reality for those on the treadmill who refuse to get off, bless their cotton socks.
Finding some version of what we call a comfort zone in this new understanding of the ‘no-self’, some area where you can act in ways that bring ease and amusement to others, while seeing that the ‘you’ involved in these socially acceptable interactions clearly and without the prejudice employed by the ego, you begin to feel compassion for those who are continuing to believe in the myth sustained by the masks of their personalities. Are you to assist them out of that robotic obedience to societal norms and personal vanity? The surges of fear, pride and righteousness, the complexity of defence mechanisms? Maybe they are quite happy to be somebody with meaningful functions and relationships. Perhaps they have no need for that knowledge of being no-one in nowhere? Perhaps they have a greater need for the demands of identity?
You feel like the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind, frustrated that you cannot seem to enlighten, that the key to their personal prison is safe in your pocket, where it is liable to remain until you accept that you are neither their guard nor their liberator, that you are free to be no-one going nowhere, and to indulge in that bliss without guilt. That you are free to travel without maps or destinations, observing, like some social anthropologist, the beings you encounter in any of the planes or planets, beings who identify with their species and evolutionary paths, beings who may have that agenda of helping and liberating, the same one you once held so high.
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