[thoughts from     ~burning woman~     by Sha'Tara]
 
A friend, the likes of complexity of friendship I've never experienced got me to thinking about our thought processes.  I'm no professional in shrinkology, just your average person trying to define myself by whatever means is given or could be lurking as yet in the subconscious or the undefined (by me); trying to put some kind of satisfactory albeit composite, picture of what it means to be "me" within the ever expanding picture of life in motion. 
 
Now that was a mouthful wasn't it.  That of course is the problem with engaging thinking and thinking about it at the same time. 
 
It isn't all my friend's fault.  As I age in the physical sense I am constantly aware that this little experience of one life in a physical body is all but over.  Binder Dundat.  Thank you very much for the memories and I have no desire to go that way again. 
 
So I analyze my feelings regarding that piece of awareness.  As to the leaving no problem: I'm looking forward to the adventure.  But what uneasiness I experience is entering that new adventure and still not being certain of who/what I am, or what I'm supposed to be.  Is there something, someone, some – whatever – to whom I must give an account?  Oh and please don't give me the Judeo-Christian rote belief here, I've had a belly-full of that.  I know all about Christianity, probably more than most who have been sincere adherents since their parents got them baptized.  I've spent enough years within that collective questioning all my involvements there.  This, what I'm thinking about, has nothing to do with any religious faith.  It has to do with defining myself through a definitive purpose.  I can only be real within a purpose.  It's not good enough to just be.  That simply means that one is a leaf blowing in the winds.  A twig floating in a stream. 
 
Purpose implies having direction and being fully in control of that direction.  To arrive at this has meant years and years of thinking about it.  And about all the great and wonderful virtues that would define the kind of person I have dreamt of becoming.  The question always remained though:  what comes first, the chicken or the egg?  Do I reach into the void and draw out bits and pieces of the egg: the virtues floating by for anyone to simply partake of?  I thought that when I was very young.  It seemed so simple then.  Until I realized that did not work.  There was no egg so it had to be the chicken.  That meant work.  I had to be the chicken and fortunately I was never quite good enough for the Colonel, so I stayed alive this long.  Hey, I even crossed the road a few times without asking why I did it.  Well OK, maybe the road crossed under me: what do I know of quantum physics, but that doesn't change much, does it.
 
What works is work.  I not only have to want it, I have to make it work in my own life, and that despite any "other" force asking me to change for it/them.  But why would I want to change?  There is still that nagging question isn't there.  Why would I choose to be different?  Why would I go against the grain, not as some wild-eyed revolutionary, but in a rather quieter kind of satyagraha: non-violent, non-cooperation?  Well, something made me keenly aware that there were huge problems with every system, every organization, every collective I came across, or got involved in.  The biggest problems were two-fold: leadership and faith.  Leaders were almost to a man, self-seeking, selfish or frightened individuals moved by their lust for power, their greed or their fears.  They weren't true leaders, they were (and remain) users and abusers. 
 
Faith fared no better simply because it never worked.  Oh sure, I have experienced "miracles" in my life.  I have "done" miracles.  Did things that under normal circumstances would not have happened.  But we do grow up, or should.  Instead of basking in the fading limelight of being a doer of the unusual I worked my way back through these happenings and discovered they were simply part of a pattern within the chaos of coincidence.  Some people attract more coincidences than others.  Some, and I include myself in that, are more likely to be the questionable lucky recipients of Murphy's largesse.  And how do I know what I did was coincidental and not miraculous?  I could not duplicate the event.  It's that simple.  Apart from the miraculous, faith is simply ascribing to some force other than yourself what you actually performed  by yourself.  That, frankly, is demeaning to the extreme; utterly disempowering.
 
So that leaves me.  Just me, and I choose not to be a leaf blowing in the winds of chance, or a twig spinning mindless in a stream of faith.  I choose to have direction and to be purpose.  To determine for myself, a Path.  A Path that leads quite naturally and normally beyond the leaving of an earth body to go into some other form as naturally and normally as I entered this one.  A form that says, "this is the way, walk in it" and I do because I can see that it is a continuation and hopefully an expansion of my former beingness as an Earthian.  Though I am (so to speak) in a new country, of a different race and different language, I am still "me" by purpose and by Path – my Path defining my Purpose. 
 
Seems to me that we are creatures evolving into thinking beings.  Or at least that should be the direction this race of beings is taking.  Sadly, as I observe, most of these intelligent and sentient creatures called "man" are not truly evolving their thinking process.  Not only are they not grasping at life to carve for themselves a personal Path/Purpose into infinity, they are not even learning to use their limited physical brain.  When in comes to using the brain to work through philosophical questions of life, most of that gray matter remains quite pristine, quite undisturbed by so-called troubling and scary thoughts: existential concepts.  If it is true that we are designed to evolve mentally and most are making no effort to do so, then it stands to reason that a large percentage of this species will not make the grade and will be eliminated as a failed experiment of useless appendages.  What serves no purpose, what does not keep pace, will not be able to keep its space in an ever-changing, ever-evolving environment. 
 
So you see that is what I've been wanting to avoid.  I do not want to be found wanting because I treasure life – not this physical aspect necessarily but all of life.  Life is amazing.  And I've just become aware of that in this incarnation.  I've just become alive.  I became an alien and stranger on this planet by looking at all the things "man" finds entertaining, valuable, necessary, enriching, empowering and safe, and saying to myself, "it's all an illusion because it all ends at death."  You see, I now know this much: that if you do not know yourself completely; if you are not your own self-empowered and self-contained "sphere" within the cosmos then you must belong to someone or something else.  You remain a slave and have no choice as to what you are, or will become should you pass through death and find yourself still alive on that other side.  You will not be any better off because no matter how wonderful your particular Toyland is, it will continue to deny you your own reality. 
 
The greatest gift of an evolving thinking mind is to give itself a true identity through Path and Purpose.  And do you know who got us started on this amazing quest?  Eve.  That is the reason she is called the Mother of mankind.  Not because she was the first woman, she was not.  Read your ancient documents again.  Even the Bible states quite clearly that when Eve's son Cain was banished to the land of Nod, east of Eden, he found a wife and began to begat, beget and begot.  Allegory?  Doesn't every allegory hide a simple truth, a truth so obvious only a thinking mind can grasp it?
 
So what did Eve do?  She defied the god's edict not to seek for personal knowledge.  Question for a thinking mind: why would a god, a creator, not want his creatures to gain personal knowledge in self-awareness?  Indeed.