Category Archives: Thoughts

The Stamp of Identity

Any word, simply by being thought, written or spoken, immediately implies a specification. In our daily reality it is very handy to distinguish one thing from another by giving each item a name. When we are dealing with subjective experience, however, definitions can often serve to limit rather than express a given experience. Obviously the psyche is not a thing. It does not have a beginning or ending. It cannot be seen or touched in normal terms. It is useless, therefore, to attempt any description of it through usual vocabulary, for our language, primarily allows us to identify physical rather than nonphysical experience.

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I am not saying that words cannot be used to describe the psyche, but they cannot define it. It is futile to question: “What is the difference between my psyche and my soul, my entity and my greater being?” for all of these are terms used in an effort to express the greater portions or our own experience that we sense within ourselves. Our use of language may make us impatient for definitions. The psyche’s reality escapes all definitions, defies all categorizing, and shoves aside with exuberant creativity all attempts to wrap it up in a neat package.

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When we begin a physical journey, we feel oneself distinct from the land through which we travel. No matter how far we journey–on a motorcycle, in a car or plane, or on foot, by bicycle or camel, or truck or vessel, still we are the wanderer, and the land or ocean or desert in the environment through which we roam. When we begin our travels into our own psyche, however, everything changes. We are also the vehicle and the environment. We form the roads, our method of travel, the hills or mountains or oceans, as well as the hills, farms, and villages of the self, or of the psyche, as we go along.

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When in colonial times men and women traveled westward across the continent of North America, many of then took it on faith that the land did indeed continue beyond–for example–towering mountains. When we travel as pioneers through our own reality, we create each blade of grass, each inch of land, each sunset and sunrise, each oasis, friendly cabin or enemy encounter as we go along.

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Now if we are looking for simple definitions to explain the psyche, I will be of no help. If we want to experience the splendid creativity of our own being, however, then we can use methods that will arouse our greatest adventuresomeness, our boldest faith in oneself, and paint pictures of our psyche that will lead us to experience even its broadest reaches, if we so desire. The psyche, then, is not a known land. It is simply an alien land, to which or through which we can travel. It is not a completed or nearly complete subjective universe already there for us to explore. It is, instead, an ever-forming state of being, in which our present sense of existence resides. We create it and it creates us.

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It creates in physical terms that we recognize. On the other hand, we create physical time for our psyche, for without us there would be no experience of the seasons, their coming and their passing.

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There would be no experience of the privacy of the moment, so if one portion of our being wants to rise above the solitary march of the moments, other parts of our psyche rush, delighted, into that particular time-focus that is our own. As we now desire to understand the timeless, infinite dimensions of our own greater existence, so “even now” multitudinous elements of that unearthly identity just as eagerly explore the dimensions of earth-being and creaturehood.

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Imagine the odd effects that might occur if we tried to take our watch or other timepiece into other levels of reality. Now, when we try to interpret our selfhood in other kinds of existence, the same surprises or distortions or alterations can seem to occur. When we attempt to understand our psyche, and define it into terms of time, then it seems that the idea of reincarnation makes sense. We think “Of course. My psyche lives many lives physically, one after the other. If my present experience is dictated by that in my childhood, then surely; my current life is a result of earlier ones.” And so we try to define the psyche in terms of time, and in so doing limit our understanding and even our experience of it.

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Let us try another analogy: You are an artist in the throes of inspiration. There is before you a canvas, and you are working in all areas of it at once. In your terms each part of the canvas could be a time period–say, a given century. You are trying to keep some kind of overall balance and purpose in mind, so when you make one brushstroke in any particular portion of this canvas, all the relationships within the entire area can change. No brushstroke is ever really wiped out, however, in this mysterious canvas of our analogy, but remains, further altering all the relationships at its particular level.

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These magical brushstrokes, however, are not simple representations of a flat surface, but alive, carrying within themselves all of the artist’s intent, but focused through the characteristics of each individual stroke.

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If the artist paints a doorway, all of the sensed perspectives within it open, and add further dimensions of reality. Since this is our analogy, we can stretch it as far as we like–far further than any artist could stretch his canvas. Therefore, there is no need to limit ourselves. The canvas itself can change size and shape as the artist works. The people in the artist’s painting are not simple representations either– to stare back at him with forever-fixed glassy eyes, or ostentatious smiles, dressed in their best Sunday clothes. Instead, they can confront the artist and talk back. They can turn sideways in the painting and look at their companions, observe their environment, and even look out of the dimensions of the painting itself and question the artist

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Now the psyche in our analogy is both the painting and the artist, for the artist finds that all of the elements within the painting are portions of himself. More, as he looks about, our artist discovers that he is literally surrounded by other paintings that he is also producing. As he looks closer, he discovers that there is a still-greater masterpiece in which he appears as an artist creating the very same paintings that he begins to recognize.

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Our artist then realizes that all of the people he painted are also painting their own pictures, and moving about in their own realities in a way that even he cannot perceive.

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In a flash of insight it occurs to him that he has been painted — that there is another artist behind him from whom his own creativity springs, and he also begins to look out of the frame.

The greater dimensions of our being

Step aside from all conventionalized doctrines, and to some extent or another we are impatient to examine and experience the natural flowing nature that is our birthright. That birthright has long been clothed in symbols and mythologies.

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Consciousness forms symbols. It is not the other way around. Symbols are great exuberant playthings. We can build with then as we can with children’s blocks. We can learn from them, as once we piled alphabet blocks together in a stack at school. Symbols are as natural to our minds as trees are to the earth. There is a difference, however, between a story told to children about forests, and a real child in a real woods. Both the story and the woods becomes involved in its life cycle, treads upon leaves that fell yesterday, rests beneath trees far older than his or her memory, and looks up at night to see a moon that will soon disappear. Looking at an illustration of the woods may give a child some excellent imaginative experiences, but they will be of a different kind, and the child knows the difference.

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If we mistake the symbols for the reality, however, we will program our experience, and we will insist that each forest look like the pictures in our book. In other words, we will expect our own experiences with various portions of our psyche to be more of less the same. We will take our local laws with us, and we will try to tell psychic time with a wristwatch.

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We will have to use some of our terms however, particularly in the beginning. Other terms with which we are familiar, we will squeeze out of all recognition. The reality of our own being cannot be defined by anyone but us, and then our own definition must be understood as a reference point at best. The psychologist, the priest, the physicist, the philosopher or the guru, can explain our own psyche to us only insofar as those specialists can forget that they are specialists, and deal directly with the private psyche from which all specializations come.

PSYCHE STRUCTURe

The earth has structure. In those terms so does the psyche. We live in one particular area on the face of our planet, and we can only see so much of it at any given time–yet we take it for granted that the ocean exists even when we cannot feel its spray or see the tides.

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And even if we live in a desert, we take it on faith that there are indeed great cultivated fields and torrents of rain. It is true that some of our faith is based on knowledge. Others have traveled where we have not, and television provides us with images. Despite this, however, our senses present us with only a picture of our immediate environment, unless they are cultivated in certain particular manners that are relatively unusual.

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We take it for granted that the earth has a history. In those terms, our own psyche has a history also. We have taught ourselves to look outward into physical reality, but the inward validity of our being cannot be found there– only its effects. We can turn on television and see a drama, but the inward mobility and experience of our psyche is mysteriously enfolded within all of those exterior gestures that allow us to turn on the television switch to begin with, and to make sense of the images presented. So the motion of our own psyche usually escapes us.

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Where is the television drama before it appears on our channel–and where does it go afterwards? How can it exist one moment and be finished the next, and yet be replayed when the conditions are correct? If we understood the mechanics, we would know that the program obviously does not go anywhere. It simply is, while the proper conditions activate it for our attention. In the same way, we are alive whether or not we are playing on an earth “program.” We are, whether we are in time or out or it. Getting in touch with our own being as it exists outside of the context in which we are used to viewing it.

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As we dwell in one particular city or town or village, we presently “live” in one small area of the psyche’s inner planet. We identify that area as our home, as our “I.” Mankind has learned to explore the physical environment, but has barely begun the greater inner journeys that will be embarked upon as the inner lands of the psyche are joyously and bravely explored. In those terms, there is a land of the psyche. However, this virgin territory is the heritage of each individual, and no domain is quite like any other. Yet there is indeed an inner commerce that occurs, and as the exterior continents rise from the inner commerce that occurs, and as the exterior continents rise from the inner structure of the earth, so the lands of the psyche emerge from an even greater invisible source.

PSYCHE: Conscious and Unconscious

We come into the condition we call life, and pass out of it. In between birth and death, we wonder at the nature of our own being. We search our experience and study official histories of the past, hoping to find their clues as to the nature of our own reality.

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Our life seems synonymous with our consciousness. Therefore it appears that our knowledge of oneself grows gradually, as our self-consciousness develops from our birth. It appears, furthermore, that our consciousness will meet a death beyond which our self-consciousness will not survive. We may think longingly and with an almost hopeful nostalgia of the religion of our childhood, and remember a system of belief that ensured us of immortality. Yet most of us, yearn for some private and intimate assurances, and seek for some inner certainty that our own individuality is not curtly dismissed at death. Each person knows intuitively that his or her own experience somehow matter, and that there is a meaning, however obscured, that connects the individual with a greater creative pattern. Each person senses now and then a private purpose, and yet many are filled with frustration because that inner goal is not consciously known or clearly apprehended.

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When we were children we knew we were growing toward an adulthood. We were sustained by the belief in projected abilities–that is, we took it for granted that we were in the process of learning and growing. No matter what happened to us, we lived in a kind of rarefied psychic air, in which our being was charged and glowing. We knew we were in a state of becoming. The world, in those terms, is also in a state of becoming.

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In private life and on the world stage, action is occurring all the time. It is easy to look at oneself or at the world, to see oneself and become so hypnotized by our present state that all change or growth seems impossible, or to see the world in the same manner.

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We do not remember our birth, as a rule. Certainly is seems that we do not remember the birth of the world. We had a history, however, before our birth — even as it seems to us that the world had a history before we were born.

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The sciences still keep secrets from each other. The physical sciences pretend that the centuries exist one after the other, while the physicists realize that time is not only relative to the perceiver, but that all events are simultaneous. The archeologists merrily continue to date the remains of “past” civilizations, never asking themselves what the past means — or saying: “This is the past relative to my point or perception.”

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Astronomers speak of outer space and of galaxies that would dwarf our own. In the world that we recognize there are also wars and rumors of wars, prophets of destruction. Yet in spite of all, the private man or the private woman, unknown, anonymous to the world at large, stubbornly feels within a rousing, determined affirmation that says: “I am important. I have a purpose, even though I do not understand what it is. “My life that seems so insignificant and inefficient, is nevertheless of prime importance in some way that I do not recognize.”

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Though caught up in life of seeming frustration, obsessed with family problems, uneasy in sickness, defeated it seems for all practical purposes, some portion of each individual rouses against all disasters, all discouragements, and now and then at least glimpses a sense of enduring validity that cannot be denied. It is to that knowing portion of each individual I Speak to.

Flight of Geese and their “New” home

The view of sky sweeping over the hill makes it much easier to see the great flights of geese heading south for the winter. Twice a week in the daytime, and once at night, large flocks have passed over. On each occasion, we can hear them inside the house, then rushed into the yard. The geese seem to be more numerous on cloudy days and clear nights.

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One late-afternoon gaggle reached nearly from horizon to horizon, in three long and very noisy V-formations. And always, one bird led each V, with the two sides of the bird ‘lettering’ trailing back quite unevenly–wobbling, flexing, shifting. What free sociable claques, I thought. Amazing, the way their honking carried back to me. I watched the geese fly toward the hills on the far side of the valley; I could still hear them even when they’d become practically invisible.

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In its way the nighttime visitation was even more mysterious, for that time I looked up at a starlit but moonless sky that didn’t have a cloud in sight–and heard this multitudinous sound moving across it. The night was chilly. All of the qualities of the birds’ flight were heightened for me by its very invisibility, for while I actually saw no geese at all, that sound was everywhere. And what guided, innate knowledge–or what? And I knew that no objective reasoning processes alone could explain their magnificent flight.

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Some how the twice-yearly, north-south migrations of the geese have become symbols for me of the known and unknown qualities of life–sublime and indecipherable at the same time, enduring yet fleeting, and almost outside of the range of human events. For me, those migrations have become portents of the seasons and of the earth itself as it swings around “our” sun in great rhythms. The one consciousness (mine) stands in its body on the ground and looks up at the strange variations of itself represented by the geese. And wonders. In their own ways, do the geese wonder also? What kind of hidden interchange between species take place at such times? If the question could be answered, would all of reality in its unending mystery lie revealed before us?

ESP: Is more developed or consciously available in some individuals than in others.

But so is a “gift” for music, or baseball or whatever. I find it difficult to believe that many millions of people must wait for a handful of their “superior” peers–philosophers, scientists, psychologists, parapsychologists–to tell them it’s all right to believe in at least a few of the inner abilities that each of us possesses, to whatever degree. Obviously, numerous individuals simply refuse to wait for the official light or recognition to shine forth.

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That wait could be a very long one. Who is to help initiate meaningful changes in our psychological and social orders? Surely many people feel the necessity to turn aside from the selected dogmas of our time. Our world present definitions of personality are so limited as the conventional meaning implied by the term ESP.

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Science is “objective” enough in its own terms of serial time and measurement, as it claims to be, but that eventually it must choose to look inward as thoroughly as it does outward. To me, much of the turmoil in the world results from our steadfast refusal to accept a major portion of our natural heritage. We project our inner knowledge “outward” in distorted fashion; thus on a global scale we thrash about with our problems of war, overpopulation, and dwindling natural resources, to name but a few.

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Each of us chose such a course at this time — but now, I think, a time of imperative change is necessary if we are to continue our progress as a species. A new blending of inner and outer consciousness’s — a new, more meaningful coalition of intellectual and intuitive abilities — will be the latest step in the process of “consciousness knowing itself”.

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There are bound to be significant clues as to the nature of the human animal: creative clues that can’t help but enlighten us in many — and sometimes unexpected–ways.

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Consciousness is more than encompassing enough to embrace all that we are, and everything that each of us can even remotely conceive of doing or being. Try as we might, we’ll not exhaust or annihilate consciousness: Whatever we accomplish as people will still leave room for — indeed, demand — further ramifications and development. And in the interim we can always look at nature with its innocent, spontaneous order to sustain us. We can at least observe, and enjoy, the behavior of other species with whom we share the world.

Reincarnational, counterparts, and probable selves, and families of consciousness, suggest the human personality.

Also hints of the invisible psychological thickness that fills out the physical event of the self in time.

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Following an intuitive and inner organization rather than a linear one, would arouse the creative revelatory characteristics of the psyche. The psyche’s deep resources evolve into timeless material. Like being reckless in the pursuit of the ideal.

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No one, whether that individual is a psychic, a mystic, a writer, a poet, or even if he/she combines all of those qualities, can encompass all of the incredible differences within the human species. It’s up to the multidimensional, multitudinous, over for billion multinational individuals on this planet to follow their own intuitions and seek answers in their personal ways.

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We have much to learn about our inner and outer worlds that once an attempt is made to discuss those large issues, a host of questions arise.

Thinking that our encounters with others are caused by chance…

Except for those we purposely bring about through choice, such as marriage partners. Yet, second thoughts make us question old assumptions; Granted the existence of counterparts to begin with, certainly their common goals, though differently expressed, would bring them together when possible. The same would apply to any group. So beneath such gatherings there would be hidden dynamics, psychological activities that could explain the behavior of crowds, political parties, and so forth.

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An individual reactions to a given idea or event can vary tremendously, form the most withdrawn behavior to the most explosive.

“SHIT” and “SOUL”

We apply the term in a derogatory manner to ourselves, and think: “I am full of shit.” And where does the great spectacular reality, the physical reality of our earth, spring from? Why is shit not considered sacred and blessed and glorious? We think of shit, unfortunately, as the antithesis of good; and when we play around it or with it, we think we are being childish at the best, and wicked at the worst.

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A child sits, perhaps three years old, with his finger stuck up his ass, feeling the shit that warmly runs down, and that child knows that shit is good. Then, give him credit!

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We think that the soul is a white wall nothing written upon it, and so our idea of sacrilege is to shit upon it, not realizing that the shit and the soul are one, and that the biological is spiritual; and that flowers grow from the shit of the earth. And in a true communion, all things of this life return to the earth, and are consumed and rise up again in a new life that is never destroyed or annihilated, though always changing form.

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So, when we shrink from such words or such meanings, why do we shrink? Because we do not trust the biology of our being or the integrity of our soul in flesh. We are people. We are made of the stuff of the earth, and the dust from the stars has formed into the shit that lies in piles — warm piles that come from the beasts and the creatures of the earth. And the shit fertilizes the flowers and the ground, and is a part of it.

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This does not mean that we should use such a word to make other people uncomfortable.

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Our soul and our flesh are wedded together. One is not “better” than the other: Both are good. Both are, and we are both. The heritage of the earth, in our terms, is ancient and yet ever new, and when we write, we write with our intelligence and our wit. Yet if it were not that we shit once or twice a day, we would not be writing anything.

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Yet when we laugh, we laugh because we still think the word is beneath us, and we are being sneaky or smart-alecky–or we think I am–by speaking so freely.

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When We say “soul,” we do not snicker.

The difference between probable realities and reincarnational ones.

According to our intent, our desire, and our beliefs, our ideas intersect with the reality that we know, with physical space and physical time — they become real, in historic terms. In other realities there are different historical terms. A war won here, with a treaty, is not won somewhere else, and there is a different treaty. Even wars seemingly won here are not nearly as clear-cut as would appear; we make history as we go along. We rewrite it as we go along. As records are lost, we do not even realize that we have rewritten the past.

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It does not serve our species’ purposes at this time to work with the mind–with telepathy, with feeling for the earth that we could have developed.

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We could have developed very well as a super-human. People chose to develop in a very different way. Therefore, that world-probability in which telepathy and clairvoyant would have been common, well-known facts of life, self-evident in any civilization– that probability became latent while the species followed another route.

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There are points, where probabilities meet: intersections with space and time that occur in our minds while we change directions, where new probabilities that once lay latent suddenly emerge. And in terms of our civilization and our time, such a time is now.

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There is no knowledge, however! See what our mind learns from the words. See what we learn that is not in the words. Hear, because many of us like the sounds so well, the insects creeping across the forests of Europe and Africa. But hear also the voices of acknowledgement of our living cells as they grope and grow in the sacred continents of our own physical energy. See the oneness, and the ancient newness that is never repeated.

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One sentence repeated is not the same sentence that it was before. One breath is not another. We are never repeated, and what we know is always new. Because we know it, and because we are the one who knows it, it is never what another one knows. So all knowledge is public–and scared. And ancient and new.

The rocks cannot speak words that we hear, and we do not listen when our cells speak to us. The archaeology of our own being.

Castles of our past and our future, and the mental civilizations that are our heritage and our birthright. Hear, then the fossilizing within our spirit speak.

When we communicate with the gracious ease with which those primitive people communicated, then we can call ourselves civilized.

As a member of the human species do we indeed see ourselves as supreme flower of history so far, yet when we can know what is going on clearly and concisely on the other side of the city, and communicate it also, then we will be as primitive and as civilized as some of those primitive people.

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Esoteric history has nothing to do with the people.

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The experience of the guru who sits in opulence, bejeweled and be-gowned, has nothing to do with the migrant worker who works in the field and whose belly is empty. And so it has been through the centuries.

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In our terms, our histories were not written by people who worked the earth. They were created by the priests and the elite, who made up their own histories to suit their purposes–to hold down the masses. Those histories never spoke of the vast, massive emotions and needs of the human beings involved, who listened, because their hearts and survival depended upon their doing so, to the voices that speak within the earth that your instruments even now cannot perceive. Those histories did not tell of the human beings who had to know what insects would crawl of fly from one end of a continent to another, so that they could be captured and roasted and eaten. They did not speak of the human beings who had to know what migrations of animals would roam through their land–and when and where, and at what phase of the moon–lest they starve.

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And so those people lifted up their minds and hearts and heard the voices of the earth speak to them, as they still do. The elite did not hear those voices. They wrote histories in which in their own memories they annihilated races of people with emotions as strong as real as theirs. The elite leave us records and methods, telling us of kings and queens, of gurus and prophets and gods, in whose eyes the masses of the people vanished. They learned techniques, but the techniques did not bring them magic, did not allow them to really hear and understand the voice of one leaf.

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So forget all of the histories, and listen to our own thoughts, which are today alive and vital as those of any man/woman ever born, in whatever time. Forget the dusty old records and feel our reality in the movement as we are. In that moment can we hear the insects sweeping across the continents and the voices of the leaves speak, and feel their echoes in our blood– and that blood lives, beyond the time. It throbs beyond destiny, even as the masses of those people live beyond the beliefs of those gurus.

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The vitality of our present being, and the authenticity of oneself.

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The most sophisticated and the most primitive,with combination of the English words, in our terms, are understood by the proud intellect that rises above the shoulders so securely. Yet the sounds upon which those words ride are far more sophisticated than the language of which we are all so proud. For they are indeed the sounds of insects through the centuries, of stars swirling through the universe, of the blood pound through our veins.

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Not to bow down before gurus and histories. More has to do with the mass beliefs that people chose at various times, and the different roads that were taken in our reality. Any road taken in our reality should–but does not–tell us one thing: By the very fact that we have chosen a particular road, we can be sure that other roads, entirely different, have been taken..