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Being Human

What does it mean to be human?  This has been asked before.  I don't know how to think about the question.  But I think about it anyway.

If there is something that it means to be human, is it in my life?  I look into my life to find it.  I am influenced by others.  But I want to see what I am, if anything, beyond that influence.  Beneath what influence has made me, and beneath what I've made myself, am I anything?  I want to be.

I want to be free of influence.  To live in the world without touching it and without it touching me.  To have pure and separate experience.  I want this in part because I want to see what I am when I'm not trying to be anything.  The universe is huge.  Almost none of it has anything do with humans.  I want to feel as small as I really am.

At school I was bullied by exclusion.  Occasionally a bully would harass me directly.  But that stopped and I became a ghost.  When there was nothing anymore to be gained from bullying me the bullies left me alone.  I disappeared and was no one.  I wasn't mature enough then to enjoy the silence and instead I felt tormented.  Now I appreciate the luxury of vanishing.  There is an expectation that I will want to be important but I don't.  I don't care to make anything of myself.  I want instead to see what I already am.

Simply put, I don't see the human condition as more real or more important than anything else.  It is to me only part of what's real, and the rest is so much larger.  There is more to life than being human.  And that is what I want to experience.

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