Know thyself is to know that you are two and you are one. You are separated and you are whole.

You are a divine creature walking around in a spacesuit. The divine part of you cannot function in the physical world of form. So when we come to this land of paper and plastic, of fire and flesh, of old and new, of beginnings and ends, we need a protective coating. I am a hue in a man on a mission to Mars.

The spacesuit. It is true. It is big and complicated. Look how hard it is to even learn how to walk (a year to get it right). Two years to get sensible sounds coming out of our mouth pieces. But there is no exploration of thyself without a spacesuit. So our divine beingness steps into a human capsule. Suddenly we have all this fancy equipment : sensors, feelers, clinchers, eyeballs and ear holes, nostrils and nails at our brand new finger tips. But these gadgets can be distracting and sometimes our package becomes more important than our purpose.

So we are here. Okay, it isn’t easy. Suddenly I feel hunger, something that doesn’t exist in the other realm. I cry out. Nobody comes ! So then I feel fear, something I’ve never felt before. Then I’m surrounded by other spacesuits. They all look at me with opinions. They say I’m crying because I’m spoiled, a pain, cranky or colic. They point and pronounce.

I come down with a mission to know myself but as soon as I arrive all these other astronauts tell me what I am (well, mostly, what I am not). Of course, I just assume they know better than me because they can stand up without holding on.

The inner glow dims. It is there (because beingness cannot not be) but the mission eventually loses its initial purpose and all energy goes into the spacesuit itself. Thus the dieting, the hair coloring, the eyebrow plucking, the cellulite suckling. I dash about doing this and doing that. I reach out grasping these and grasping those. And to find out how I’m progressing in my conquest of the land of manifestation I just have to look into your eyes.

Sometimes I hear whispering. But it is so hard to hear because it comes from so far away, so far within. You are not a spacesuit, it says. You have a mission, it says. An inaudible adage from ancient times and suddenly my oxygen mask is filled with self-doubt. I hesitate.

But then my phone rings and, well, I’ve got to run.