I admit I have, I have delved deeply into my comprehension of self in relation to the whole.  It has possessed me as much as any single question has been able to impress itself upon my brain cells.  This single question has gripped me for stretches of ten or more minutes and come up repeatedly in my urge for peace.

It seems to me that in my childhood I grasped a sense of the whole; it was a feeling that had no intellectual support.  And so I asked that age old question. Why?  Why does life look the way it does when everything in my heart tells me there is but one life.  The answers I got were weak even from a three year olds perspective but they always came with such authority there was no room left to explore.

It’s not that my parents were particularly authoritarian.  On the contrary, for their generation they were very open minded, I would never have become who I am if it hadn’t been for that openness.  They were just answering the subjective questions of a child objectively; they were addressing emotional queries empirically.  What I was looking for as a child were answers that addressed the stirrings of feeling in my heart.  I rarely got that, through no particular fault of anyone. As I said I was blessed with very open and inquisitive parents. They were still the product of their own parent’s persuasion.

So I forgot; I forgot my original perception that was based solely upon feelings and started to develop a style similar to my parents.   Slowly I began to understand their world; I saw the conflicts and witnessed first hand the challenges.  I came to know the fear of being alone, the need to be right and the importance of being successful.  I came to inherit the world view of my parents.

Slowly, by increments, the pattern seemed to shift.  I lost sight of the fields of energy that forever swirled around and played with me. I grew older and by those same tiny measures my world perception changed, completely, a hundred and eighty degrees.  I got lost in this outer world.  I became fascinated by shapes and sizes, by colours and smells; the things that caught the eyes of others became interesting to me.  I found myself constantly enamoured and ensnarled in the glittery little trinkets of the world around me, always seeking to possess them.

Eventually the toys of the world started to lose their allure.  I began to wonder why all things seemed to be accompanied by some form of pain and suffering, I became wary of the pain that would inevitably come with the prize and I found myself less and less interested.