And that's why I play with fire and train the mind - To fear no darkness or pain.
I've been in a strange mood the last few days.
It's a dangerous, subversive idea to this society we've built. The idea is one of the unborn. The potential. That which may never be.
Start with a physical birth. We can work towards this, to fall in love, create something, a someone, with your selection out of many that you meet. All that is needed is that catalytic spark of attraction, activation energy between two beings that causes an immensely complicated biochemical organic compounded mess that we call making love, with the ability to bring a new being into being. At that point, anything can happen and they can become anyone according to the rules that we, as a society, have granted them.
But much of reality has to do with the concept of birth and death beyond the physical level. Who I am now is not who I will be years from now. Who I am at this very moment is not even who I will be days, hours, mere seconds from this fleeting moment in time. During the course of our "lives", every cell in our physical body will be replaced countless times over. What else do we have to call the self other than the consciousness of who we perceive ourselves to be?
I change. I am sad. I die. I am reborn happier. I am weak. I die. I strive to become stronger. And so through the passage of infinite lives spanning our misconception of time, we bring beings, perceptions of the self, into existence that have never existed, and we dream of those that may never be. We bring into existence new paradigms, new ways of looking at the universe, into a multitude of different personal universes that we create. There is a you within the realms of possibility: happy, cheerful, in love with life. There is a you within the universe of hope, a potentiality to overcome as many obstacles in your way as you can struggle over, climbing tenuously - as long as you take those steps in the right direction.
As for the right direction - study yourself. Study the world around you. Make your own decisions. Imagine where you'll be at the end of your life if you live every day as though you will die tomorrow. Live in every moment as if the entire existence of the universe - billions of years, cause and effect, life springing from the lifeless, evolving complexity, creatures making decisions, all the way up to humans - struggling, living, dying, loving, suffering, all of it happening just to bring you to this one moment, in this place, with these people. And from here, you can make a choice, to see if you want to bring the unborn whispering to life, to create your legacy, to live how you want to live. Without suffering and with happiness, bringing happiness where ever you go - or to suffer "lives of quiet desperation" within yourself, because you never opened your eyes to see the beauty that is all around.
It gets better. It gets addicting. The idea grants us power. It takes root and spreads from person to person. "Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation. Every emotion expressed resonates without interference in consciousnesses that are wide open to external impressions, each one echoing the others. The initial impulse is thereby amplified and echoed, like an avalanche that grows as it goes along." That the heavens are within our grasp, because we can create it, utilising our minds and our abilities. As we think, we do. We can.
That is the story of potential. Your potential, as a human being.