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You Are Not A Thing.
It’s tempting to think of yourself as a thing. After all, the world is full of them. Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, they bombard you with their thing-ness. With their separateness and definability. Trees and rocks and cars and buildings and countries and rules. There’s no getting away from them.
When you’ve been surrounded by things for as long you have, it’s natural to believe that you are one too, although it doesn’t happen straight away. For the first few years of your life, you’re blissfully ignorant of the illusion of thing-ness. There are no limitations, no borders, no shame or insecurity. You aren’t a thing, you simply are. It’s only at the age of two or three that the world finally succeeds in convincing you that you’re as small as it believes you to be.
It’s a shame that we get confused in this way. Being a thing brings with it a whole host of problems and insecurities and fears. Understanding what we are is the first step of understanding what to do after all. So if we mistakenly think of ourselves as things, it’s no wonder that we sometimes find life so difficult and lonely and confusing.
Most of the confusion surrounding our thing-ness comes from the fact that we have a body, which actually does happen to be a thing. A body can be touched and seen and hurt…
