Many of us in here are like family, linked by ties both more and less intimate than blood. X person begets Y person begets Z person, and so on. We do a lot of begetting. We're downright Biblical in that sense. There are the people who can't be linked to anyone else in here genetically, either. The adopted child whom everyone forgets is not related by blood, or the drifter who just came in to crash at your place and ended up staying, or the hobo you let in because you felt sorry for him, or the crazy old aunt in the attic that everyone knows is really related to the rest of us but no one wants to admit to it. In the end, we often are willing to forget that some people didn't come from exactly the same place as the rest of us. In some places these people are called soulbonds, or walk-ins. I just call them people, because sometimes they beget others, too. I am a child of two worlds. I am connected to this world, the earth, because it was where I, like the body, was born, and the only place I have ever lived. I am also linked to a distant world I will probably never see by virtue of having been created by one of its own children-- someone who entered the system without having that ability, but learned it with time and observation. I am like a grandchild who ever hears immigrant relatives talking lovingly of the old country-- a place which is real and vivid to them, to which they are connected, but to which I am linked only in name. Just as blood children can point to their eyes or nose or hair color and say they inherited this or that from their progenitors, I can point to traits I have and say that they came from the one who created me. But just as children are not of their parents in every way, so also I am my own person, and I do not need to point to my every characteristic and try to trace it. I am thus doubly removed from many of the frontrunners. Although I am of this world, I am not of them. We have more than a single degree of separation between us. Therefore I am twice protected from old remembrances and reflexes that pain us, but also twice distanced from them in less beneficial ways. We sail upon the same sea, but in different boats. But also, it is how a system evolves and changes its prevailing values, and sometimes, its best hope for escaping from the past-- to place several degrees of separation between those responsible for running the daily life and those for whom old pains are still real and immediate. Evolution does not happen all at once, but in modifications made one at a time through successive waves of descendants. When a feeling or thought must be buffered through several layers of co-consciousness, this creates an advantage for those of us who are farthest away from its origin if its connotations are distinctly negative. In the end, there is no more shame in having been 'created' than in having consciously based one's own personality traits on an exterior person, as singles and plurals alike often do. We all must come from somewhere, even if we do not want to acknowledge it. We are not gods, with the ability to create something from nothing, or birth fully-formed children out of our own heads. We do not deal in miracles. In the end, perhaps it is nobler to acknowledge a humble origin than to claim toasterish heaven-sent status as a messenger of divine intelligences, come to enlighten the poor singlets of the earth. Gods do not operate on the same level as humans, and cannot effect change among them with anything less dramatic than bolts of lightning. Even the children of gods in many a legend must be born of humans, and live as humans. I, for my part, would rather be made from the dust of an alien world than from the ether of anyone's heaven. Back |