Dear friend,
Thanks for dropping in. It's alright if you feel that you are an outsider. There are many people who identify themselves as outsiders. However, I'm not sure that you are what you think you are. You may just think you came from somewhere else. You might be suffering from amnesia, having been the victim of an accident that you don't remember. You may even have a different sexual orientation now! No one knows exactly when you began to split off or when you had that first inkling that you were different, but let's consider some of the possibilities. It could be that you were abandoned briefly as a child. Possibly, you were an accidental zygote, the result of either love or exploitation.
Perhaps you were a stepchild or a child of mixed-race parents--both of which are steps toward the universal race of the future. Or you rebelled early against the constraints imposed by a particular culture or just against the expectations of your parents. I'm only trying to understand.
You probably wanted to be free of prejudice. You may have been attracted to a person from another minority group. Maybe you admired a relative or friend who was exotically, appealingly different. You may be set apart because you are more intelligent, or simply because you understand things differently. In you there may be a little bit of Jefferson who envisioned a new world, of Beethoven who rebelled against the musical forms of his age, of Gandhi or Ralph Bunche whose visions of peace embraced the whole world, of Einstein who was punished for his rebellion when fate made him into an authority, of Marie Curie or Martin Luther King, Jr. who paid with their lives for the gifts they gave to the world, or of Nelson Mandela or Kim Dae-Jung whose courage outlasted the tyrannies that threatened to destroy them.
I don't know. Perhaps you were angry with your parents or your community, so you rejected their beliefs and values but then found yourself adrift. You could have grown up in one country and now live in another--an outsider to both. Your family may live there, but you are here...and there...and everywhere or nowhere.
You may have been sickened upon learning about atrocities committed by previous generations of the group or nation into which you were born. You can't stand the self-absorbed, self-indulgent, militaristic or materialistic attitude of the society that surrounds you and pins you down while it destroys the natural environment. Perhaps you've noticed that your detached, over-intellectualized friends are all beginning to mouth the same automaton-like opinion: "The human species is moving inexorably toward self-destruction, and there's nothing we can do about it."
No matter what the cause, you are different, and you bear the subtle but unmistakable mark of pain. It hurt to separate, to not belong, to have to disagree, to not be understood. Your hair or your clothes may signal the effects of your personal experience of apartheid, or you may hide your secret, esperanto self beneath an appearance that conforms. Somehow you found your way here.
Truth be told, you belong here. You have divested yourself of overriding obligations to a particular group, and you now belong to that most underrated and undefined gang: humanity. You are a citizen of the world. For you, you said, it's everything or nothing. Now free to think on a broader plane, you are beyond the narrow interests of a particular religion or nation. You can tap the resources of all peoples, see each from the perspective of the whole. Your identity group is the human race.
You may have drifted from one political movement or religion to another, always seeking a place that feels like home, like a truer expression of justice, art, or the search for an authentic system of democracy. And now you know, as much as you may not want to belong to anything, that you are one of us. You may be rich or poor, but by your very being you are changing the world, making it doubt itself, making it wonder whether it took the wrong path...and where will its present path end?
You are creating the images and the values that will guide us into the only future that makes any sense--the village of life struggling against the forces within and without that threaten to destroy us. You are like the Buddha who learned to think in new ways, who denied that he had privileged access to the word of God. You stand opposed to those who expropriate the truths taught by all the great prophets. You haven't shrunk from the challenge of rethinking the world, from the questions that must be asked...even in the face of death.
I've been listening to you. I've seen the ways you've survived, how incredibly creative you can be. I know, even if you don't, what amazing, almost magical powers you have. I'm learning how to grow from you.
I wish I could understand everything, but here is the essence of what I think you are saying...
A. You don't have one nation...you have 8 Levels of Being.
B. You don't pretend to know the mind of God...but your cumulative wisdom asserts 8 Truths.
C. You come into being, proceed through life on an 8-fold path, and go out of being.
Well, my friend, you may wonder whether I've been hearing those funny voices again, but you know that "8" implies "many," and this is merely my own distillation of all that I've heard from you over these past 8 years. It's good that, though far apart, we live in the same village now, you there...me here...or vice versa. You know where to find me. I still hang out down where the river meets the sea, listening, always willing to learn, waiting for that bottle with your message in it...
Thinking of you, I remain a
Will Foreman