[ the lost nature of our being, dept. ]
It’s easy and seemingly natural, for the new-born baby being to become a specific ‘person’; for the egoic entity called ‘me’, to mentally, emotionally and psychologically, apparently, appear and to enter into the long days and nights of filtered experience; of learning how to react by observing, copying and pretending to be an adult with all the fruit and freight of normal adulthood; to become beguiled by the bling of personal experience, events, thoughts and feelings and opinions that arise, appropriate and appear to fog and distort our original essential innocence with culturally conditioned desires and fears.
As very young children we learn – painfully and pleasantly – that the best way to survive and perhaps, hopefully, thrive, is to cooperate and collaborate, to detect and protect, to somehow and in some way, manage and manipulate our environment. We learn to learn how best to pretend, defend and befriend in order to reduce the threat(s) to our security. Indeed, our experiences teach us how we could and should react personally, according to the dictates of parents, peers, and people we’ve come to rely on since early childhood to confirm our sketchy, mind-made sense of personhood. That’s all human, well and good for most of us, but for some few, at some point, it’s not good enough.
We feel a deepening despair in our pretensions, in our confusions and delusions, and we wander from the crowd. Thankfully, as the saying goes: “All those who wander are not lost.”
In fact, in sum, those of us who wonder may find that they never lost their essential, fully content being. One may, with grace and sincerity, find that one is that which is peaceful, beautiful and joyful. Aware. And delighted simply, fully, to be. 🙂
