Pen Pal Project #15 | Gen and Francis
I Fell Inside a Bin
I Had No Idea Who I was, Where I was, and What I was.
Welcome to our collaborative series where Gen(Genevieve) and Francis (both Medium writers) become companions of the written word. Through these intimate letters, we embark on a poignant voyage, sharing our innermost thoughts, cherished experiences, and profound discoveries. As pen pals navigating the digital landscape, we weave together the threads of our lives, exploring the depths of both profound and everyday subjects. Each letter offers you a glimpse into our worlds, an open invitation to join us in forging connections and engaging in contemplation. Come, embark on this journey of shared expressions, as we unravel the captivating intricacies of friendship and the enduring power found within the written word.
Gen’s previous letter:
November 11, 2023
Dear Gen,
You’ve raised profound topics of life after death, life paths and the very nature of our existence. Who am I? What am I? Is there life after death. Is there life before birth. What is this reality we live in? Who or what created it? Why am I here?
I’ve been searching for the answers to these questions since I was a teenager. It has been the same quest for many people throughout history.
But why even ask? Some people don’t. They are quite content to live their lives without knowing and that is perfectly fine. I thought it would be fun to answer that question with a beautifully written tv script. Could you watch this episode of the Twilight Zone first before reading any further?
Here is some profound dialogue from the show.
The major:
What’s going on here? Where are we? What are we? Who are we?
The ballerina:
We’re nameless things with no memory. No knowledge of what went before. No understanding of what is now. No knowledge of what will be.
Narrator:
Clown, hobo, ballet dancer, bagpiper, and an army major — a collection of question marks. Five improbable entities stuck together into a pit of darkness. No logic, no reason, no explanation; just a prolonged nightmare in which fear, loneliness, and the unexplainable walk hand in hand through the shadows.
Ballerina:
Maybe we’re all insane. Or maybe this is a mirage, an illusion.
When I was born, I woke up in a bin. It’s called Earth. I could have just accepted that I was simply in a bin and not question the who, what, and why. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I wanted to know the nature of my existence. It’s the explorer in me. Some explorers fly to the ends of the world and explore the place we call earth. I explore the nature of reality and I do it from a chair.
As the ballerina said, when we are born we’re nameless things with no memory. No knowledge of what went before. No understanding of what is now. No knowledge of what will be. I had to know all of that.
The Vision
I don’t remember the year or the day but it was in my early twenties I believe. I remember I was lying in my bed and staring up at the ceiling and a thought, or vision if you will, appeared. It was that there was a blob of consciousness that had separated from a much larger consiousness which was the source of everything. This smaller blob was searching for a home and it found Earth. This blob became the source of all life on the planet as it split itself into individuals that would be the consciousness of entities called humans, animals and plants.
At the time I had no idea why this vision popped into my head because I had not read anything that was similar. Many years later I read “Conversations with God” by Neale Donald Walsch and it explained the origin of who we are in mostly the same way as my vision.
The Answers
Here is what I know. This is my reality that I’ve created. It’s certainly not the same for everyone. Some people are content to live in the bin without knowledge of their nature. I wanted to climb out and understand my nature. So I’ll answer the Major’s questions:
What’s going on here? Where are we? What are we? Who are we?
What Are We?
We are a soul, a consciousness, a spirit, a divine spark, a life force. We are the eternal self. The name doesn’t matter.
We also have a body that seems physical but it is an illusion. At the same time, our most valuable power and curse is that we create our reality by our thoughts. I’ll talk more about this later.
There is one source of all this consciousness that we all come from and you may call it Universal Consciousness, God, the Divine, the Source, the Great Spirit or The One. The name doesn’t matter.
This Source is experiencing what it’s like to not be itself. It is doing so by splitting itself into infinite pieces of itself. Each piece or individual is given the illusion of a physical body, the greater illusion of a physical universe, and the gift of forgetting. We are all born not knowing what we are, who we are and what’s going on here. In this way, the source is able to experience, through each individual, what it’s like to not be itself. It is the relative nature of our existence to know unity and then to know separation.
Or to put it in another way, it dropped a bunch of dolls into a bin and wiped their memories and knowledge in order to let the dolls explore the very nature of their existence and the universe.
Who are We?
The answer to that is the simplest answer. We can be whoever we want. We have free will to make choices. While the answer is simple, the process is extremely difficult.
The protaganist in this story is the mind. The mind creates stories and we believe those stories. The most important stories come from our childhood. It would defeat the entire purpose of our existence if we simply lived lives of consciousness and we behaved as if we were all one. Just as salmon must endure a long journey facing waterfalls and bears to get back to their origin, we must do the same.
We must all experience the pain and the struggle of forgetting we are one. That is the pain and the illusion of not being loved. It is the pain of separation. So we create painful stories in our childhood to experience the fear of separation from the whole. We take these into our adulthood and our minds create the suffering because we believe these stories. These are the waterfalls and the bears. That is why the Buddhism says life is suffering. As bad as it sounds, we are meant to suffer. Until we don’t.
While we have free will to be whoever we want, our mind creates the obstacles. Our entire life journey is letting go of stories, letting go of the waterfalls and the bears and returning to our true nature. Our true nature is unity and pure love. The two concepts are the same.
When humans search for what they think is love, we mostly search in the outside world which is the illusion. We think that love is something that can be given and taken from other people. That belief creates so much pain and fear rooted in the idea of separation. Although, it is exactly what we need to experience. When we’ve had enough of that, we can move on to the next experience. What we are truly searching for is unity. We are searching for the knowledge and experience that we are part of the whole. That is love. It is the energy that flows through each of us and binds us together as a whole. It is returning to the knowledge that we all came from the same source.
Our journey is to realize what we are not who we are.
Where Are We?
We are in the most complex and detailed imaginary simulation. None of it is real in the sense that there is anything physical. That includes our very own bodies. In fact, the notion of anything solid in our universe is nothing but an illusion. Quantum physics is beginning to understand that mystery. They have yet to find any particle that is solid. As they discover smaller and smaller particles they find that each particle is nothing but space and energy.
This is the playground where we explore the nature of our existence. It is literally a hologram of the most sophisticated nature and it comes with it’s own set of imaginary rules like gravity, the speed of light, life and death.
Yes, life and death are an illusion too. Albeit an extremely powerful one.
As I mentioned before, our thoughts create our reality. We see the world around us the way it appears to us because our collective consciousness agrees that that is the way it should look and behave.
In the movie, “The Matrix”, the protaganist, Neo, embarks on a journey to discover the true nature of his reality. If there was ever a piece of literature that perfectly described the nature of our universe, it is that movie. When he discovers that his world is a computer simulation, he begins training to manipulate that world through the strength of his belief that he can create his own reality through his thoughts.
You have to let it all go, Neo, fear, doubt and disbelief. Free your mind. — Morpheus (The Matrix)
And that is the way to create our own reality on this imaginary planet we call Earth. Fear, doubt and disbelief are what hold us back. Letting go of our stories and attachments is what frees our mind. Our journey is to understand what our true nature is. We are not humans having a spiritual experience. We are spirits experiencing a human body. When we get that, we are able to manipulate our hologram that we call the universe. We are able to end our suffering.
I’m not at the place where I am going to jump across buildings but I am experimenting with altering my reality through thought. I call it “golfing”. It’s much safer than jumping through space.
I’ve been playing golf for many years and I spent most of it practicing and perfecting my physical swing. However, in the last year or so, I remembered that I’m living in the Matrix. I woke up to the idea that my path to the mastery of golf and to experiencing the manipulation of my reality was to work on my inner game. My new journey would be to let go of fear, doubt and disbelief. Yes, if you’ve never golfed before, every player experiences fear that they will shank the ball or doubt that they can hit the ball cleanly towards the target.
Most golfers begin their training by downloading information about how to hit the ball. Eventually their bodies will coordinate dozens of muscles, bones and tissue to collectively send the ball soaring towards the target exactly as they intended. Once they accomplish this, the only thing left to do is to be able to do it consistently. They need to master the mental game. They need to believe that they can do this on demand. They need to manipulate their reality into their own making.
Golf basically allows you to hit 72 strokes over 18 holes. If you take exactly 72 strokes you‘re said to have scored par for the course. I typically was scoring 20 strokes above. In the analogy of the matrix, that would be equivalent to falling into the pavement after taking the leap.
Then it finally happened a few days ago. I made the leap into believing. My friends and I were playing at a golf simulator. Here is my scorecard.
The line that says par is the number of strokes it takes to score par for each hole. As you can see from my score I was mostly in the zone from holes 1 to 14. I believed. I have never played that well. As I got ready to play the 17th hole, my friend Dan, who is loqacious to say the least, started saying that even if I scored really badly on the last two holes, I would still have an overall good score. That thought floated around in my mind just before I drove off the tee at the 17th hole. I thought, yeah, he’s right. If I screw up on this hole it will still be a good game. And in fact, how did I manage to play so well over 16 holes without barely making a mistake?
Doubt and the idea of playing bad crept into my mind and the result was that I hit 5 extra strokes I shouldn’t have on the last two holes. I was on course to shoot a 71 which would be close to some professional golfer’s scores. And so I fell into the pavement as I leapt!
This is my most recent example of how powerful my thoughts are in creating my own reality.
What’s Going On Here?
This is where everything gets summarized and put into a nice package.
We are energetic beings born into an imaginary world that have forgotten where we came from. We have forgotten that we come from one source which the creator that is pure love and unity.
It is our journey to remember.
We do so by playing in an illusion of a physical universe. Our journey takes us through many lifetimes to evolve from not knowing to knowing.
We are all actors on the same vast stage. We have characters, plots, and settings. When we experience what we call death, it is simply the end of this one theatrical play. It is the curtain call. The hologram program ends and we move into the afterlife to review how our performance was. We make assessments and then we come down to do it again. And again. And again.
We make soul agreements with other souls to experience different aspects of being human. We may want to experience forgiveness. Adolph Hitler was also a soul and he made a soul agreement to be one of the most heinous murderers in history. Our parents are souls and we also made soul agreements with them. Embracing this origin of who we are is the path to healing and the end of suffering.
I think about what is happening in Israel and Gaza now. As long as both sides are lost in the illusion of our existence there will be no peace. Killing will only create more killing. It will be a vicious cycle that never ends. It can end if there is the realization that we are all souls that came from the same source. It can end if we realize that we are on a stage performing in a play. It can end if we realize we can rewrite the script into one of letting go, forgiveness and peace.
It’s easier said than done, but the alternative is to continue the killing for centuries.
Remembering that we are part of the whole is what they call unity consciousness. Apparently, when we reach that awareness we don’t come back to earth.
How Does All This Help Me?
Many years ago I acted on stage in local theatre productions. I loved it and I would get lost in my role. Everything seemed real and that it was actually happening. Then my scene would be over and I would go back to the green room. In theatre, the green room is a room where you go off stage to get ready for your next scene. You can go over your lines or do a costume change and relax before you go back on again. You can also reflect on your performance and chat with the other actors. It is here that you remember that you are an actor performing in a play. None of it is real.
In my day to day life, I spend most of it being lost in the play. I am my character. I interact with the other characters and I feel everything. When I step out of the play, I find myself in the green room. I enter my green room when I meditate and find quiet time and space to reflect on my experience on stage. I remember that I was on stage and that none of it was real. I don’t take anything personally because we were all actors agreeing to perform the same script.
It is at this time that I remember what I am, not who I am. Who I am is the character I play on stage. What I am is a conscious energetic being or soul that is experiencing what it’s like to be human. I’m supposed to forget that I’m an actor on a stage so I can remember that I’m just an actor on a stage.
I reflect on my performance and whether I can do a better job at being who I want to be. And then I get back on stage to do the next scene.
Living this reality has enormous implications towards living a life of joy and love. Imagine seeing my parents as other actors in my play that we all agreed upon. I would not take anything personally. There wouldn’t even be a reason to forgive them for anything because we were all just souls acting. That goes for my childhood bully. That goes for everybody.
But I also have the power to simply surrender to the script as it’s written or I can rewrite the script. I mostly choose to surrender to the script. That’s my surrender experiment that I’ve written about before.
I know that the script is bringing me the perfect scenes, settings and characters.
I know that the script is the perfect vehicle for my evolution to remembering what I am.
And that’s all I have to say about that. — Forest Gump
