Number Forty Four

Memory anchors our identity.  The garden with the straight, white paths; the rumbling streetcars that descend -- between dark storefronts -- to the sea: By those scenes I know my loneliness.

Memories make us.  And we return again and again to each familiar image, hoping it will reveal the truth of ourselves.

But we are amnesiacs, captive to the scenes of a single life.  The rest of us, felt in the movement of sun and shadow, known in the chill preceding dark, heard in wind and birdsong and falling water, dwells in a hundred forgotten lives.

Number Forty Three

Identity is to self as a cover is to a book.  It is the face of self.  We learn to recognize ourselves by our cover, by familiar patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.  Identity is built on a sentence that starts, "I am a person who..."

Identity includes the emotions by which we know ourselves.  "I am a person who is...(angry, afraid, sad)."  And characteristic ways we cope.  "I am a person who...(shouts, avoids, gives up, drinks)."  Identity born of reacting to life is left behind when we leave the body.

Identity that grows from what we've learned becomes part of self.  Of soul.  It is an enduring core wisdom that evolves with each life.  "I am a person who has realized..." is the place where self and identity merge, and the reason we are here.

Number Forty Two

To understand what self is, we must first know the purpose of self.  Why are there seven billion "selves" on this planet?  They are all here for one reason: to learn.  To gather experience and wisdom for the whole.  The whole can only evolve and grow as each self observes, remembers, acts, and learns.

Just as bees have mandibles, wings, and legs for the sole purpose of gathering pollen, all the properties of self derive from its purpose.  To learn, each self must observe experience, remember experience, organize experience (into categories and higher order conclusions called wisdom), and choose mental and physical actions (focusing awareness and deciding what to do).

No learning can happen without engaging each property of the self.  No wisdom tradition can find truth through a single aspect of self.  As each self learns, the whole becomes god.

Number Forty One

The storms roll down, washing away what holds us.  What protects us.  Taking the walls and rooms of a world we counted on.  As clouds obscure the sky, storms of the spirit obscure the truth.  Hiding the knowledge that nothing is lost; that the self is constant, never broken.

Damage is an illusion.  The idea of safety or protection is an illusion.  There is nothing to be safe from.  Nothing we need to protect.  It is all safe -- everything we love.

The storm is mere forgetting.  A momentary blindness.  The truth waits, eternal and untouched, until we remember it again.

Number Forty

Everything outside seems dangerous.  The rooms where we feel safe are defined by the familiar, the faces we know.

The people we don't know could do anything, say anything.  We protect ourselves by deciding they are evil.

But the mere thought that there is good and evil creates evil.  Because it is the means by which we separate ourselves from the other.  Reject the other.  Dehumanize the other. Separation -- the delusion that we are not all one -- is what evil is made of.

There is no them.  The room that seemed so small it contained just a single life holds everyone.

Number Thirty Nine

We speak to ourselves like politicians at a rally.  Full of judgments about what's wrong, and demands for action.  Nothing happens.  Nothing changes.

We carry images of the perfect self, what we will never be.  We pretend it's possible, but the ideal becomes less a goal than a source of damage.  A way to dehumanize.  The perfect self is a despot, ready for carnage.  Ready to find failure in every choice.

Seeing the self as it is, flawed, full of pain and the compensations to escape pain, is the only path to something new, and a way to the divine.

Number Thirty Eight

Objects link us to the past.  They are alive with the souls we love.  They let us travel back and forth between here and the time we come from.

The voices of my parents, at the moment of a gift -- this desk -- do not reach here.  There is no way to keep them except through the weight of every object we have in common.

I ask them to come to me -- in the table and the dresser, in the candlesticks and the yellowed papers.  Do I recognize their handwriting -- yes.  Do I see their pain -- yes.

Let me gather these things and live among them.  Quietly.  With love.  So I can hear what they are saying.