Collectively and communally,
every night when you go to sleep, you become
a deep sleeper. You re-dream the biblical
stories. This is the key Earthfolk insight that you
have to make your own.
Like a sojourning alien, you have to take a step-back
and look at your life. Most of your life you have done things without
analyzing or evaluating them as if you’ve come upon them for the
first time.
Why would
a sojourning alien presume that humans do not
communicate when they are asleep?
Why would
they presume that the individual is
in total control of her own thoughts and actions, and not
essentially acting out the group’s thoughts and
actions?
If you arrived from outer space, you’d find humans
as creatures who live in groups. You’d learn
about their sense of social connectedness and how their
cultures differ but then how much all human groups
have in common, especially biologically—meaning,
they have the same brain—possibly,
you'd conjecture, a group brain.
Take a moment to reflect upon
the experience of being born. You did not
create yourself, that’s obvious. You learn later
on in life that you spent up to nine months inside your mother’s
body. Then, that your father’s sexual seed
was mingled with your mother’s egg—and that’s
how the process began. Mind-boggling stuff when
you first hear it. Later on you also realize
that for years you really had no sense of yourself,
other than your own name.
It took time before your feelings
of separateness and individuality appeared.
Often these feelings of separating from the
collective and communal, the familial
identity, were dramatically negative and
you felt a great sense of loss. You felt like a misfit, an outcast,
a loner, at times even abandoned or a loser. Yet there were
also times
where you felt empowered. You could do things!
Have your own thoughts and opinions—be
as argumentative as hell and claim, “You don’t
have the right to tell me what to think or do!” And
you’d get away with
this!
Continue—Deep
