Exile

Being inside (the tent) is smooth, warm and soft. Being outside is jagged, tight, hot or cold, prickly or hard. It doesn't matter what the tent is. At the deepest it is the separation of the original fall; the exile from the garden (of unity). In the everyday it is generally separation from other people at the individual and collective level. And separation is often from our self; fragmented parts and lost parts. Experiences that might have been but were only glimpsed in the imagination still seek expression so that some aspect of the self might flourish. Might flourish that through the self, the Self might see and thus make the whole point of the original fall; we come out of unity to have experience. (The tree of knowledge so often taken only to represent sexual knowledge, is of course the very content of our lives. Sexuality is an aspect of the wider erotic impulse.) Painful indeed then to look on experience with some part of that experience attached to something that never was. And more so if what was / was not puts one outside the (imagined) group experience. The group experience affords living expression of separation in unity. All that I have been is is clearly all that could have been. That which is, is. Yet we all have unexpressed wondrous parts; many unopened buds. There is a sadness in life that many such buds will not flower. Yet if karma ripens such that we see the buds and can imagine the flower then at some level maybe this is the flowering. No wonder this complex of connection and separation takes a life time to mature and then only if we are lucky. If I could go back with the ghost of Christmas past and give the gift of hindsight to myself would this be a blessing or a curse? Would I, in trying to save my younger self pain and my current self grief, rob my self of wisdom? Did being outside let me see a bigger tent?