How about this;
We are this amazing creature which has the ability to capture passing spirits.
We are super cunning at it, and spirits are super gullible.
So we all capture a spirit which is just floating around, doing it’s own thing. You know, spirit stuff.
Bammm! We capture it. Put it in a jar.
It’s me, this physical entity, which much release that spirit back into the wild.
In the moment I do that, I evolve into a happy and harmless creature.
Everyone wins.
Maybe one day long long ago, I woke up and was startled by a particularly bright blue sky, so i created another self to protect me from this scary place.
I kept this analog ‘I’ as my security blanket. Made a whole world for ‘him’. Made him suffer instead of me.
“into your hands, I commit my spirit”
What if, as a primordial feeling, I was just too scared? I felt that creating another ‘me’ around myself, I could keep myself safe?
“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”
As time went on, I forgot that I had created ‘him’. I became ‘him’. And now, I suffer with him, and blame him, for my own fear. My own anger.
“It no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me”.
So everyday, I hang him out to dry. Alone, forsaken. But it was always me, the primordial self, that was scared. Angry.
So I parade him around, like a puppet, sticking him with nails.
Yet, he is the most likeable thing I ever did. Innocent really.
So today, I take him down from that cross, and I put myself there.
In doing so, we both disappear.
(I am playing with the idea of “conversion” as the vehicle for change; it’s only when everything is on it’s head, we get the chance to experience change)
In less words;
‘I’ am my feelings and ‘my’ feelings are ‘me’.
Chatting with @henryyyyyyyyyy I was reminded of the “trip” I had converting away from Christianity.
Completely sober. Not even alcohol. Yet, tripped every day. Oneness, wonder, mystery, discovery!
And then progressively less and less.
As Henry said; what if I came upon Actualism for the first time today?
A wide and wonderous path! A magical fairytale land of sensual delight!
Sign me the fuck up.
Can I roll with this from another less poetic angle? (Not that I’m not partial to your artistry, quite the contrary, I just lack the ability):
I was walking around the other day feeling fear. I observed that fear was unpleasant. On the hedonic scale of pleasure and pain, it’s squarely on the painful side.
I noticed that, now accompanying that fear/pain, were thoughts and images presenting scenes like out of a movie, that put moving pictures to my fear/pain.
From there, in that world of emotive thought, there was a further movement to analyze, formulate plans and strategies, in order to manipulate conditions that would dispel the fear/pain.
I then saw what it – the entire process – was trying to do, what it was designed to do, in its own quaint way.
Behind the mental images, behind the calculations, behind the word symbols, behind all the vivid cognitive simulated scenarios, behind the anxiety, behind even the fear itself, lay that basic emotive pain.
Ah, I saw what it was doing. What it was there for. That pain. It was trying to protect. Protect through pain.
It’s function is too hurt. The idea is that if it can hurt me emotively, it can protect the body from being hurt physically.
You get scared of heights. The fear is unpleasant. It hurts. It’s slapping you, injuring you emotively to keep you from being injured physically.
It’s all protection. Every layer, all the passionate pains, and probalistic anticipatory cognition, are there trying to shield you from harm. It runs simulated disasters in your mind so as to help you avoid them in the physical world. The emotive pain is there to get you to move to safety.
Better here (in the mind) than out there (in the physical world), it thinks. (Though it doesn’t think.)
Emotive pain may not be necessary anymore, but it doesn’t know that. It doesn’t understand. It has a job to do, it wants to keep protecting you. To keep shielding you from that outside world where injury, disease, and death abound.
(I’m not being precise as to using me or I up there from either identity or flesh and blood body. They’re all well enough tangled up in this ride together as far as I’m concerned, for me to bother with demarcations. Sometimes you discern the tractor and the trailer, sometimes you just see a single tractor-trailer.)
Indeed, ‘I’ am an ancient storehouse of remembered pain, that must be avoided at all costs; somewhat ironically: even at the cost of this body, and that body, and every body.
However, what if I remembered who was afraid to start with? Certainly there is no one to blame now. My origin is lost in a distant and pastel grey past.
So the son forgives the father because he sees he was also a son, and the father forgives the son because he sees he was always here to replace him. They are the same thing. A Mobius strip. Chasing the end of something which didn’t have a start. They were angry at the clouds and scared of the shadows. They stared too long at the sun. The leaves looked like an angel, and the stones like a creature from the dark.
All one needs is a single moment when the blame becomes still, when there is no one to blame anymore, there is no one left.
“Give unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s and to God what is God’s”
What is left?
A bright blue sky! A watery blue paradise, with green and gold plains, rolling billows of crystaline clouds and ice capped grey granite as old as time.
That’s interesting @rick, and all of a sudden it makes sense how a benevolent universe could give birth to a situation that we find ourselves in, the passions had a job, it is nothing to do with evil or the universe being malevolent.
It’s actually quite interesting to put it like that - that a benevolent and benign universe arranged itself in this particular way, how could it be evil?
I had thought just that, with those precise words: benevolence.
All pain, physical or emotive, is ultimately protective. At least that’s the intent. Dare I say …
As Richard said; it’s a signal that “something is going wrong”.
Sometimes signals trigger signals.
Sometimes the signal is mixed up.
Sometimes it’s just the sun behind some leaves and we get scared.
Do you know that there is a single Russian man that saved the entire human race because he ignored a warning from a newly installed missile detection system?
A single man. Ignored a warning. He rightly judged it was an error. Saved the entire human race from nuclear Armageddon.
St. Stanislav, of course 
He was reprimanded.
How very ‘Me’ to reprimanded the ‘one’ who saved the world.
That’s the funny thing about intent. The purest of intentions (ahem) may still result in harm. In injury. In catastrophe, even. So-called catastrophe.
How very like ‘Me’ indeed
Well, one can’t make an omelette with breaking some eggs.
That’s a pretty brutal thing to say.
No, the purest intent is pure intent. It’s just that ultimately nothing is ever lost or gained. One can’t add to infinity, or take away from eternity.
Yeah. Nonetheless it’s doing its absolute best.
In our case, we’ve idealized a world where omelettes materialize out of thin air with all eggs intact
I have decided that in the spirit of Douglas Adams, it was simply an ancient ancestor of ours which was startled by a particularly blue sky one morning and thus began ‘humanity’.
It’s as good of an explanation as anything I have read.
Suits me fine
Sitting across from Vineeto, she exclaimed “Why is the sky blue? Why not!”
This wasn’t long before she also exclaimed “I have had enough!”.
One must, at some point, simply be. Be what one is. The how, maybe one day will be discovered, but never the “why”.
Exactly. Why, why, why … on and on for eternity. Do watch that Feynman interview I uploaded some time. Real gold.