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This phrase popped into my imagination recently and I'm writing to explore it's me-and-thee-ing. It's sort of a statement I guess. That's how things come to me. I get no respect. The phrase said this: As long as you depend on the recognition of others to be satisfied with your identity in life, your dependency upon others and otherness makes you vulnerable to those who don't or pretend not to in order to yank yo' chain.
I may have added a bit on to the original impression. Why would I not? Nobody knows. I seem more fascinated with what I take to be a species obsession with identity, and not just recently either, but for as long as abstract thought solidified in the homo sapien framework. Maybe my curiosity is just an extension of the age-old question: Who am I?
That is a question about one's personal identity. Who am I? What am I here for? Why do I care? "Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?" Then, everybody know I'm somebody even if they don't know who I am is either.
My wanting to have my own identity above and beyond the reach of the politicians and priest class has been my lifelong pursuit. I say that now, but I only found out myself fairly recently. I mean, I knew, you know, but, I didn't REALLY know until I finally found out that what I'd always had was really mine, and not invention.
I'm writing about some sort of cornucopia. Why reinvent the wheel? The whole point is that I didn't make this resource up. I do make things up, mind you, but even I know it ain't something I can hang my hat on. Hell, everybody does that, and I've always imagined myself as different, and I ain't changed my mind.
What is different about me is the same thing as what's the same about everybody including me. That may seem silly to some, and even to me when I get drifty, but what distinguishes me from other people is my remembering vision, and it took me thirty years to even realize it. The tie-to-me is time.
Another facet of life I'm more sure of now than ever is that I can't provide anybody else with their equivalent of my remembering vision. I don't remember any ritualistic way I used to cause it to happen, so how can I tell anybody else how to tread that path on their own?
On my own, I figure my efforts are reduced to an old Oriental saying I'm not sure of the source of it is. It's "neti-neti", and means "not this-not that". If I've never been satisfied with any identity that made me dependent on another person's idea of what's wot, then how can I pretend to be an enabler who cooperates to create their dependency on me. Nobody wants that. I will let you down. Eagerly. I gnow the source for you is not my me.
It is very difficult for me to admit that. To me it announces that because I'm completely undependable, then nobody will want anything to do with me. They won't bother with me because I'm a waste of time for those who are looking for something they can sensually perceive to reassure them they matter for something. Where does that leave me? On my own? You betchum, Red Ryder! It sho' nuff' do!
The contents of my remembering vision is not all I use as a source to make me-and-thee-ing out of the world around me. It's not even the framework I use to seek the answers I need from it as a guiding oracle. I use other frameworks I didn't invent or discover myself, but accepted them as legitimate gifts from a world beyond words.
This is what I use as a source for my identity. It's beyond human reach.
TCOYOA
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
