Now in case you're
wondering
to yourself "You're joking, of course. Is that even
possible,
Laurence?
There are one hundred and forty billion of us,
past
and
present.
How can you
know
us all?", I'm not
talking
about
watchingwebcams to
see
what you do in private day by day, or ESP-ing what you
intimately
think
and
believe
and feel, or how you earn your living, or where you reside and what
your postal code is, or what you want and whom you married and what you
aspire to, or the gamut of specific facts and data associated with the
pasts,
presents,
and
futures
of your lives, or your cultures, or the partisan politics of your
home
region. I'm not even
talking
about your names. I'm
talking
about none of that when I
say
"I
know
you. Man! I really
know
you" because none of that is 1)
who you really are,
nor 2) how we're constructed to operate, nor 3) how we're thrown to
be.
In the former
conversation,
our differences are legion, infinite. In this latter
conversation,
we're each the same.
Every one of the
people
I
know
ie every one of the one hundred and forty billion of us, are charged
with surviving. At the same
time,
everyone I
know
ie every one of the one hundred and forty billion of us, longs to just
be.
Indeed, the goal of learning to survive ie the
wholepoint
of it, it could be
said,
is to protect our wherewithal to just
be.
And how each of us learns to survive, manifests uniquely, given our
stories,
given our
economic
situations, and given our
personal
sets of
circumstances.
Yet the fact that each one of us learns to survive in a unique
way,
is
common
to every single one of the
people
I
know.
That's how we're all constructed to operate.
Children
(as you'll recall by
looking
at your own
past)
are born just
being.
And at some
point,
that occupation
gets
unceremoniously shelved. We assumed at the
time
it would be a temporary shelving, and that we'd
get
back to just
being
again very soon. But oh no ... as
being
was left further and further behind us in our distant
past
like a fading memory, and as we instead
discovered
ourselves increasingly preoccupied with surviving, we begrudgingly
assumed
being
was no longer realistic. So we gave up ie we
abandoned our
dreams
of just
being.
Indeed, we shaped the rest of our lives from then on, in
ways
that compensated for our loss of just
being
- a loss to which we became more and more resigned and inured, yet
never fully accepted. Every single one of the
people
I
know,
did that. It's how we're thrown to
be.
That's two out of three. That's how we're constructed to operate, and
how we're thrown to
be.
All the
people
I
know.
Every last one of us.
Past
and
present.
You
see,
we're really not that different from one another at all. And
watch:
it's a
paradox
that even those who aspire to
be
different ie the self-styled
mavericks
among us (you
know,
those whom it's
saiddance
to the beat of different drums?) are all alike in their
desire to
be
different (which is actually a lot
closer
to
the truth
than it sounds).
As for #1 ie as for
who we really are,
those who
get itknow
we're the space (ie the
contextual
space really) in which the events of our lives occur, and in which
Life itself
occurs.
Wait!
There's more: in the
contextual
space we are, what also occurs for us is the "I" / the "me" we no
longer
identify
ourselves to
be.
In contrast, those who don't
knowwho we really are,
take themselves to
be
the "I" / the "me" that occurs for them. There's
nothing wrong
with that. It's a unique conundrum for each and every one of us
human beings
that we find ourselves at various
times,
somewhere along the continuum between taking ourselves to
be
that "I" / that "me" which occurs for us, and
knowing
ourselves to
be
/ expressing ourselves as the
contextual
space in which the events of our lives,
Life itself,
and that "I" / that "me", occur.
That's it. And that's all. That's my one-size-fits-all
description which I'll bet good
money
fits each and every single one of the one hundred and forty billion
people
(that's all of us) I
know
and
love
and
respect,
to a T.