hummingwolf (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hummingwolf) wrote2002-03-24 11:29 am
hummingwolf) wrote2002-03-24 11:29 am
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Where will you be when you find who you are?
So many people work hard to find themselves. Why do you have to find yourself? Aren't you standing right there?
Reincarnation was never a big part of my belief system. When someone had a past-life memory, I tended to think that they were simply fishing something out of the vast psychic sea surrounding us (energy never can be destroyed, after all; and where energy exists, there will eventually be some way to detect it); or, alternatively, that they were delusional or misled by some stronger personality. Yet now I'm slowly becoming convinced that people have indeed lived before: not because I believe that I have lived before, but because I'm fairly certain I haven't.
I have always been a slow learner. Many folks are surprised when I say this, as I seem to absorb new subjects quite swiftly. This seeming speed is an illusion, however: I am merely very good at integrating new ideas with what I have learned before. As a child, desperate to learn whatever it was that all other people already knew, I worked very hard to learn to read, and I read whatever I could get my hands on. When a truly new subject is presented to me, I fall behind everyone else. I almost think they've all learned it before somewhere else and--as Plato would say--what they seem to be learning is really only remembering.
People get annoyed when I ask very many questions. I am always asking very many questions. "Why do you have to ask me that? Everybody knows that!" they cry. "But I don't know that. How would I know that?" Some people act as if I were asking so much simply out of a desire to be annoying. Why can't they see that I ask so that I can find out what everybody else knows? Even small children know more about living in this world than I do. How did they learn so much without being told?
When I make a mistake, it is out of ignorance. When you make a mistake, it is a mistake made out of habit. Some habits may have come from this lifetime. But when habits begin at early ages, it appears more likely that they are manifestations of patterns of behavior you acquired long ago. Maybe you are living this life as a karmic result of making those very mistakes one hundred years ago. Or maybe those patterns were not mistakes in your past, not when you lived as a peasant in ancient China or as an elf in another dimension. Where I am trying to learn how to live, you must re-learn, you must adapt yourself to a new reality which doesn't fit the world you grew accustomed to. It is difficult for both of us.
So many people work hard to find themselves. Why do you have to find yourself? Aren't you standing right there? No, no, you're beginning to realize that you lost something--perhaps in that disreputable country inn in the 1500s, perhaps in some quieter place where you never expected the thieves who found you--and you need to get it back in order to feel whole again.
I wish you the very best of luck in finding your missing pieces. If you don't mind, I'd like to see them when you've got them again (you know how such things fascinate me). You'll know where to find me. I'll be standing right here.
Reincarnation was never a big part of my belief system. When someone had a past-life memory, I tended to think that they were simply fishing something out of the vast psychic sea surrounding us (energy never can be destroyed, after all; and where energy exists, there will eventually be some way to detect it); or, alternatively, that they were delusional or misled by some stronger personality. Yet now I'm slowly becoming convinced that people have indeed lived before: not because I believe that I have lived before, but because I'm fairly certain I haven't.
I have always been a slow learner. Many folks are surprised when I say this, as I seem to absorb new subjects quite swiftly. This seeming speed is an illusion, however: I am merely very good at integrating new ideas with what I have learned before. As a child, desperate to learn whatever it was that all other people already knew, I worked very hard to learn to read, and I read whatever I could get my hands on. When a truly new subject is presented to me, I fall behind everyone else. I almost think they've all learned it before somewhere else and--as Plato would say--what they seem to be learning is really only remembering.
People get annoyed when I ask very many questions. I am always asking very many questions. "Why do you have to ask me that? Everybody knows that!" they cry. "But I don't know that. How would I know that?" Some people act as if I were asking so much simply out of a desire to be annoying. Why can't they see that I ask so that I can find out what everybody else knows? Even small children know more about living in this world than I do. How did they learn so much without being told?
When I make a mistake, it is out of ignorance. When you make a mistake, it is a mistake made out of habit. Some habits may have come from this lifetime. But when habits begin at early ages, it appears more likely that they are manifestations of patterns of behavior you acquired long ago. Maybe you are living this life as a karmic result of making those very mistakes one hundred years ago. Or maybe those patterns were not mistakes in your past, not when you lived as a peasant in ancient China or as an elf in another dimension. Where I am trying to learn how to live, you must re-learn, you must adapt yourself to a new reality which doesn't fit the world you grew accustomed to. It is difficult for both of us.
So many people work hard to find themselves. Why do you have to find yourself? Aren't you standing right there? No, no, you're beginning to realize that you lost something--perhaps in that disreputable country inn in the 1500s, perhaps in some quieter place where you never expected the thieves who found you--and you need to get it back in order to feel whole again.
I wish you the very best of luck in finding your missing pieces. If you don't mind, I'd like to see them when you've got them again (you know how such things fascinate me). You'll know where to find me. I'll be standing right here.
Begin.
Sometimes what you carry from one life to another is knowledge you might take for granted - instincts, your sense of other people's character, your strict morals or values that do not seem to be influenced by the environment you were raised in. The lessons you know without ever having to be taught.
Perhaps your soul remembers some things and not others. I personally believe I have lived many times, that my soul is well-aged. Some things still stump me, or confuse me, and some things I am slow to learn, but rather than taking this as a sign that I have not lived many lives at all, I take it to mean that my soul has never encountered these things before, or not in this particular shade of light.
And for those who search endlessly for something missing, I think you are right. They lost something, but their soul remembers, so they spend all their years trying to get it back, missing a piecve they never knew was gone.