Meeting Yourself
When you meet with someone, you are meeting with yourself. Your self presents itself to you. The person standing before you is an image of yourself. You have a genie within you that creates whomever appears before you. You appear before yourself in many forms, and yet all of them are you projected to yourself. However you may feel about these projections, they reflect an aspect of you. Not only does this seem farfetched to you, it also seems scary.
You cannot believe you would call goblins and ogres to you. You can hardly believe you bring beauty and beautiful souls to you. Nevertheless, an aspect of you, some thought of yours has projected itself before you. Neither you -- the perceiver, nor the perceived -- may know this. And yet there was some unseen collaboration there.
In one day, a bereft beggar may present himself to you, or a wealthy businessman, a crying child, someone in a hurry, a man, a woman, young and old, and all of them are you. You are every combination possible. You well recognize each of these personages for they are you. They are an aspect of you. All of them are you.
We can add a drunken man on the street, and you can empathize or denounce because he is an apparition of something in you. You see cops and robbers because you too have been the apprehender and the apprehended. You have been the good guy and the bad guy. You have worn every disguise known to man. And yet, you cannot fool yourself. These are not strangers before you. You may not want to recognize them. Nevertheless, each is you.
When you go to a concert, you witness the beautiful music you create in your life. When you go to a football game, you are all the players, home team and visitor, winner and loser, injurer and the uninjured. You cast the characters, and you put up the props. You are the producers and directors as well. You are the villain and the angel. You play all the parts. You know what villains and angels are. You have walked in their shoes.
Everyone who presents himself to you is your guest. You may not recall that you invited them, yet you can’t deny them either.
Perhaps you wrote an invitation long ago, and it just got into the mail today.
Perhaps you thought at great length about what you did not want, and called it to you.
It is not a question of deserving. It is not a question of blame or regret, yet it is a question of responsibility. Even if an imaginary mistake has been made, perhaps a case of mistaken identity, it doesn’t matter. The responsibility is yours now. You stand on the platform now. It is up to you which train you take. You can get on, and you can get off. You can be shoved, and you can be pulled. You are the one there. How you got there is not yours to figure out. You got there.
You are the reactor and the generator of the universe.
You are its axis. You are its linchpin.
You are the process and the processor, and you are the outcome. You are the subject and the object. You are the transitive and intransitive verbs. You are the proper and the common nouns.
The bright side of all this is that you can be anything you want, and you can be with anyone you want.
The present world is of your making.
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