The Cast of Thousands

It is easy to believe that the person who has just pushed front of you is only one thing.  To you right now, affronted in your car, they are easily only a bastard, only narcissistic, or only an idiot.  You have come to know yourself well enough to know that you contain A Cast of Thousands.  It is the ultimate challenge to believe that of the other person also when they behave like such turds.  Nevertheless, it must be true if you also believe something else you believe, namely, that we are all Of The Same Thing.

It is tiring that you have come here to write and you find that you are Writing About Things That Are Capitalised.  You have had the sort of morning where you feel like you are constantly forgetting that Everything Is Fine, Just Fine.  You feel like if you were to have looked into the mirror your skin would have been standing out in jagged tufts, like a cartoon cat.  And yet there is that, but also the other state, and it is faith to believe that you can walk towards one from the other.  We all do it every day and it is courage only we know about.

And so you walked from one state to see if you could see another, and sat outside in the beautiful morning sun and been silent for 30 minutes.  You watched your thoughts flit in and out, in and out, and stop occasionally like a moth stopping for a moment and resting on a leaf.  You have watched yourself do this, and reminded yourself that all is still as it always is, as you suspect it is, and even that is enough to find the spikey tufts begin sitting back down along your skin.

An annoying cast member of The Cast of Thousands always jumps up at those spikey times to begin pointing out to you what a stupid pathetic person you are for being anxious.  Some days you cower before this cast member.  Others, you talk back to it and it retreats. You have even taken sometimes to sitting down with it or one of its kind and an open Word document and asking it questions.  It talks back to you and says surprising things.

You are grateful to Plato and his Forms, and Jung and his archetypes, and Reality and her non-duality.  Indeed, you remember one of those archetypes, how it came out to make itself known in your dream.  An Anglo Aussie farmer, late 50's, weathered, beaten, his face drought-lined, came to you in your dream, naked into your bedroom except for his hat, and stuck his fingers into you and you woke yelling.  And so with the help of another one wise, you nailed him down.  You drew the dream, you did stupid embarrassing things like sit in a chair and be him, and then sit in a chair and be you and talk to him, and the nasty man morphed under your hands.  You drew clothes onto him, and then tears ran down his cheeks.  The wise lady pointed out how in your drawing you portrayed your body as one half, and he was another half, and if you cut the page in the half and turned it around, it became one body.

Some of the Cast of Thousands have particularly harsh manners of speaking.  They cow you, you flinch away from them like a dog from a harsh voice.  But they are you.  You project them out onto the bastard in front of you but they are you.  That person in the car in front of you is also, to many intents and purposes, you.

It has been proven that our bodies do not know the difference between us thinking bad negative thoughts about someone else, and thinking them about ourselves.  So it is bad enough that you have as part of your life's work learning to understand what several cast members of The Thousands want, when they speak to you so badly, learning to take their energy and turn it to better ends.  You can take their presence as licence to say awful things to yourself, to thinking the thoughts that become the reality out in your world.  Even worse to consider that when you do it to other people outside of your own body, who have pushed in front of your car, that it is as if you are doing it to yourself.

But of course there are many beautiful members of The Cast of Thousands that sweep in like a summer night breeze and take your breath away.  They are wise beyond all of our years, they are beautiful beyond description.  They are young and old, male and female, all pieces of you made symbols so that you have something to work with, so they don't slip through your hands like water.  Some of the Cast of Thousands enjoy singing songs on your own personal radio station - 666 Radio Susie on the FM dial.  Sometimes phrases come out of nowhere.  One came the other day as if on a breeze with a phrase you had not thought of for some time:

"Do not despise the day of small beginnings," it said.

Such a beautiful phrase.  A delightful doorway.