Sometimes we see ourselves as separate and isolated from a world which asks (or as often, demands) of us that we be or become these separate nodal trees as labelled identities and alienated decision-machines of consumption and compliance to fuel the swirling, rolling, tumbling chaos and confusion that our cultures and Global civilisation represents and embodies. We need these selves, these identities and labels as means and ways to leverage the possibilities of existence and probabilities of survival and living in an uncertain world but, if we were to defocus our vision just a little and seek to perceive the forest and sum total of which those many trees are all a living part we soon come to understand that a human being is not one thing, no simply-bounded container or product of discriminating and limiting forces beyond our control. We are in fact the forest and as such are singularly unified in a living presence; not each as lonely drop in the turbulent sea so much as the cosmic ocean and infinite complexity as intelligence merged into, through and as each self-contained drop.
Consider, further, that it seems as though this wholeness and overarching fact of which we are each and all microcosms and instances can only exist or manifest and continuously self-propagate as the sum total of all those separate little individuals that comprise it. The differences and distances between us all are not merely or only the functional outputs of a complexity beyond reckoning or explanation, they are the effective transmission medium by, through and as which this world (and all the frightened little home sapiens in it) self-replicates.
Difference is the method and the message but it is not the final truth; itself, a fact that so few seem able to acknowledge as, once having become so securely ensconced behind their imaginary and symbolic or psychological castle walls, these boundaries become intuitive, reflexive and necessary obligations as tickets of participation in a world of turbulent complexity and natural (as much as synthetic) information that reproduces itself through and as us. In this way, we become trapped by a dependence on an abstraction of difference as paradoxical self-identity that is neither real nor sustainable and yet without which we could hardly even exist or know anything at all. Notice also that difference is the foundational definition of information in all its forms and this itself nods towards the profound computational complexity that we unwittingly embody and renew through our many and diverse yet willing self-deceptions of belief, mythology and (many other forms of encoded) memory.
It is not that we should not come to know ourselves as separate or unique individuals of complex resilience and delicately fragile yet creative sentient blossoming and experience. It is that in understanding the many ways that this diversity cultivates the possibility of the grander themes and historical information flows we inhabit, we come to recognise that we are all the same energy and information flow as instances of this endlessly unfolding complexity and unfurling unity. You must inevitably fight and struggle to win this battle to heal yourself but never forget that successful healing as a holistic property in this world means that if it ever fully happens in one person or place, it happens everywhere.
Difference and distance breeds isolation and an adversarial self-contempt that masks itself as tribal certainty and partisan dissonance that achievesclittle more than to endlessly regenerate and self-validate itself. Our shared enigma is that without the difference and distance that reflexively defines us all, we would have nothing, no knowledge, memory, culture, history or experience and no one to heal. Healing self is a matter of losing that self in subtle ways for which most of us are hardly mature or emotionally secure enough to engage. Such psychological freedom is not purely or only of self, it is from self and in so doing, a much greater human freedom and subjective identity is born. In this way, true healing sets us all free.
Daedelus Kite 