A GOOD EGG

Carl Gleixner, an old German Catholic with thick lenses who rented me the mother-in-law unit in his backyard, once told me, "You're a good egg, Winslow. I don't know what it is you do, but whatever it is, keep doing it."

I have acute scoliosis and adult-onset Ankylosing Spondylitis, which means that my spine is gradually becoming a rigid staff of bamboo. To boot, at the time of my writing this, my knee is killing me, and my back even more so.

Is this something that "I" am doing, Carl? Or, is it "my" body doing it to something called "me"? In either case shouldn't "I" (or it) just stop, since it hurts so damn bad? Or should I (or "it") keep this affliction going, since it is the very thing that makes me that eternally good egg, whom you, Mr. Gleixner, beheld through your Coke bottle glasses?

But in all seriousness, am I really a good egg? And if not an egg, then what good am I at all?

Who am I, really?

A spark of the Infinite Life invested itself in a zygote and nine months later, on 16 January, 1967, a body emerged into the world that was given the name "Eric" by his parents and later, more presciently, the name "Seraphim" by his spiritual father. This "Eric" - or these "Seraphim '' - made their way through the fields of experience afforded by the Earth, absorbing the shocks of pleasures and pains into the ethereal membrane of the soul, gathering impressions like the bees do honey ...

“We are bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the invisible, to store it in the great golden hives of the invisible" (Rilke).

I think all that honey now being secreted away in the vibrating info-hives at Google. Lots of people now google things to see if they are really things. Like, just now, I googled "Coke bottle glasses" to try to see if this was really a thing, or whether I heard it wrong and was hoping to get it right, so that when I wrote this creation myth of "me," I wouldn't make of myself a public ensample of malappropriation in writing some foolishness like, "Carl could really see who I am me through those beer-bottle lenses of his." (Carl would toss back Heinekens one after the other, so this would not be such an inaccurate portrayal in writing of this codger, this sage, this Socrates of the trailer park). 

In waxing so eloquently, I forgot what I was going to say. O, yeah ...

I was going to say that whenever you forget who really are, you can always google yourself to find out.

But I still haven't forgotten who to be, so I'm good.

A good egg, that is.

That's the most important question, isn't it? Remembering who you are. One old Greco-Armenian wiseacre once called it, "self-remembering." 

   We have forgotten who we are. 
   This is the original sin. 
   We do not know where God ends
   And where women and men begin. 

Those are “my” lines, not the Greco-Armenian wiseacre’s. He wasn’t as eloquent as “me” (depending on who the antecedent of that first-person object pronoun might be). But he would have been. Had he been me.

Once upon a Timeless time, outside of time, I know everything. And so did you!

All is well, and all manner of thing is well, and all manner of thing was, is, and will be well, because everyone whom you and I knew have known everything all along once we will have realized, at the end of time, that we had known it all, all along.

In spite of all current evidence to the contrary, there is no darkness; no evil; no ignorance; no sin; and no (real) pain because the truth of the way things are is now obvious to all. Nor was there ever any of those illusions or delusions, though this fact is not so obvious anymore. Not since you forgot where and who we are.

Back then (and even now), the fact that you all have already always known and accepted everything for what it is also means that you know that knowing everything entails knowing what it's like to not know everything, as well as what it's like to know only a very limited scope of things through the narrow slit of darkling light that is conscious experience.

That is to say, to truly and completely know everything - absolutely everything! - you must somehow know nothing as well; and having an experience of nothing, and of seeing everything only through a tiny opening in the veil of nothingness that covers everything like a pair of Coke bottle glasses, is also part of the experience of knowing everything, however strange or paradoxical it may seem.

So then, what exactly is it like to always know everything already (including the experience of knowing nothing, or next to nothing); or knowing only the way things are within a very small ambit of the totality of reality?

I ask you again: What is it like?

What exactly is it like for you now?

You already know everything now, and yet it appears that you know next to nothing.

How can this be?

Well, what if all there was to know, about oneself, or anything else, was that the cosmos and everything and everyone in it (including yourself) can be imagined as a single, perfect, Golden Egg?

This great Cosmic Egg is a symbol of the Good. It is a Good that we cannot articulate with our tiny brains, and even if we had a googolplex bytes of computing power, who I Am would ever remain an infinite and eternal mystery.  

Is some part of yourself forgetting who you are now, while the rest of yourself remains knowing all, and seeing all, and being all, along with everyone else, like that inconceivable cosmic egg?

Or is there some other mystery afoot here - an unthinkable enigma too complex for a forgetful and limited mind like ours to understand? After all, if there really is something it is like to be an Unlimited Mind, then that unbounded experience cannot limit something it is like to be a limited mind.

How could one go about verifying the astonishing assertion that we already know everything, even while clearly knowing hardly anything? Is there some proof? Some justifying evidence? Or, even if there is no direct and incontrovertible fact that can be pointed to in order to unravel the enigma of our mysterious being, are there any signs or hints by which one might infer the truth of this grand paradox?

If forgetting that I am the True Self is the cost of the ticket to manifest a separate self, then forgetting (the illusion that) one is a separate self must be the price one has to pay for the return ticket, back to the True Self, back to the Good Egg.