Belonging 

Why we feel out of place.

This might sound like an odd thing to say, but perhaps we don’t belong here, and by here, I mean in existence.

That feeling that you have that you are different, out of place, that other people seem like they belong here, but you don’t, that feeling of otherness? Everyone feels like that. 
Everyone.

Perhaps existence is not our natural habitat and this is why we have to leave it every night to go home, patch ourselves up, take a deep breath, and return again in the morning.

Work

Perhaps it is a bit like when we go to work. We know our workplace is not our home so we don’t expect it to feel like home. If we expected our workplace to feel like home we would always feel out of place at work, but we don’t, we know work is work so we feel fine. 

Perhaps we don’t know existence is our workplace so we keep trying, and failing, to feel at home here. 

Perhaps we are like creatures who come from the sea and spend our days walking around on dry land. As we leave the sea each morning a thin layer of unconsciousness covers us like water and we spend the day letting the sun of existence burn off the unconsciousness as it transforms to consciousness.

The burning process is how we grow in consciousness. Some days we return to the sea as wet as we left it, other days we have burned so much we can almost hear our bones crack. We persevere with the day until we can no longer bear it and then return to the sea, return home to the mystery.

When we open our eyes each morning, we come into work. We choose to forget about our home, not because it is easy, not because we want to be unconscious, we choose to let ourselves be covered by the unconsciousness of forgetting so we can bring that unconsciousness to the opportunity of existence. The chance to have it transform into consciousness.

We are so valiant as we gasp in the sun letting it burn us, letting it burn off the unconsciousness as it transforms it. 

We endure the pain and bring the new consciousness back home each night only to return again the next day, and every day, over and over again, not remembering, blind to our own radiance.

The Ocean Inside

Our skulls are densely packed with lots of blood vessels, neurons, bone, membranes, and all sorts of other stuff. 

If our skulls were real estate it would be Manhattan. And just like Manhattan’s central park, which is a big empty space in the middle of a densely packed area, our skulls have big empty cisterns right at the centre of our brains. These cisterns or ventricles as they are called are full of cerebrospinal fluid which is very similar in composition to seawater. 

The poetic perspective on this is that we never left the ocean, we just figured out how to carry it around inside us.

Perhaps it is the same with our home. We leave it to come into existence each day but we also carry some of our home inside us as we spend our day here. We come from the mystery and carry it inside us and this little piece of the mystery helps us find our way home each time we focus on it whether during the day or at night.

It is there ever present for you right now. You don’t need to remember anything to feel it.

We are fish out of water, which is why existence feels so unnatural to us, why we feel so out of place, strangers in a strange land no matter how many years we are here. 
It never feels like home because it isn’t. 
We are creatures of the sea. 
We are creatures of the mystery. 

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