YOU CONTAIN MULTITUDES

YOU CONTAIN MULTITUDES

You say you are good, kind, pure, spiritual.No, no. You are alive. You cannot be reduced to a concept, positive or negative.

Don’t mask your aliveness with words.A murderer lives in you. A rapist. A terrorist willing to destroy the world to find peace. A saint. A saviour. A sinner. A soldier. A warrior fighting for a cause. A pacifist. A mother, father, sister, brother. A lover. A healer. Rage and despair, terror and ecstasy. And numbness too. A lion lives in you, and a deer, a walrus, a worm, all the great beasts of the ocean.

All vegetables and minerals, all the stars in the sky, all the dreams ever dreamed, all the lives ever lived.You contain it all. All potentials. All possibilities. All histories.Your heart is a stage and all the players move around in your heart, so which player will you nourish? Which will you inhabit, moment by moment? Which will you attempt to deny, or destroy? Which will you shame, which will you numb, which will you bow to?If you don’t need to define yourself, you can be all beings, all of the time, and none at all.And then you will have compassion for all beings,for you will see them all in yourself.

You may not agree with them. You may not like what they do. But you will understand their broken hearts, their terrors, their loneliness, their nightmares of the daytime, their unanswered prayers. You will see how they struggle with pain they cannot hold, feel feelings they never learned how to feel, think thoughts they think are unthinkable. You will see how they have made truth into something fixed and external, and have forgotten their mysterious nature. You will weep as they weep, and laugh as they laugh, and nobody will be alien to you any longer.There will be no ‘us’ and ‘them’, no sides, no enemies, no sense that you were born superior.You will have woken up. It was only a play.

Breathe, feel your feet on the ground, friend, reset the stage, and never forget, never forget, you will play all the roles in your time.

- Jeff Foster