Chapter Two

With this really neat emotional background, I began to realize the world is not all soft and fuzzy. Not everyone breathes to be honest and loving. I found quickly that a lot of things I felt are important to quality of life (beauty, freedom of choice, health, prosperity, generosity, peace in the heart) don't even enter into the conscious awareness of many folks. This same year, the dreaded sixth grade, I began to wonder if the world I can sense with my eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and mind is all there is. I was attending a catholic elementary school and got my A in religion every semester, but what I learned in school did not match my view of the world. I mean, when my catholic principal taught us that humans are superior to animals because we are made in God's image and have immortal souls that will one day return to our creator in heaven and animals don't I said no way! My horse is every bit my spiritual equal--perhaps even my spiritual superior. Chucky knew how to live content with simple things: clean water, fresh hay twice a day, and a simple job in life: take care of a 9 year-old girl. No way could I buy that this magnificent creature was not also made in the image of God.

I mean, come on--humans destroy one another in conflict over natural resources, sexual persuits, greed (also known as a false belief in the illusion of lack), etc. How many other species engage in such behaviors?

I began to question a lot of what I was being taught in religion class, and in many of my classes, quite frankly. I felt many questions rooted deep in my soul that went completely unaddressed in school and in my peer groups. Why was I born? What is the point of this life? The sun rises and sets every day. I eat, move around, learn stuff, excrete waste, make friends, breathe, play. But so what?

So what, indeed.

By eighth grade, my best friend and I had devised several alternative models for the structure of the universe than what we were being fed in school. Like, what if we are all just part of a complicated science experiment from an alternative rhelm? Or worse yet, a simple one! Or what if this world is really just a hologram--nothing is solid nor real; we are all just energy bodies interacting according to certain rules and spatial restrictions. What if we could change these holograms at will?

Would it matter? Back to So what, again.

[This question still perplexes me. At 27, it seems like maybe loving and living in line with honest guidance from my heart makes a lot of sense. Harmonizing with authenticity, as a dear friend put it.]