Who I AM Not

Who i am not

They told me I was born on such and such date;
I believed them.
They told me this is your mother and that is your father;
I believed them.
They told me I am a girl and girls do this and they don’t do that;
I believed them.
They told me being naked was shameful and
I believed them.
They told me ‘wear this, or you will catch a cold;’
I believed them.
They told me a woman gets married, and this is only right and proper;
I believed them.
They told me to be strong and
I believed them.
As I believed, I hardened into a rock.
My beliefs made me concrete.
They told me that fire burns and you can’t go through walls; I hardened some more.
They told me this is good and that is bad;
I believed them.
They told me the world is flat and they told me it is round.
They told me cancer kills, but the flu does not.
They told me time exists, that the future is important, education is the means, and money is survival;
I believed them.
They told me death is bad and being born is good. Bad people are dangerous and good people are to seek after;
I believed them all.
But why, with all of these directions, did I feel worse and worse?
How can you limit the unlimited and make it feel better?
How can you put the infinite into the finite and think that you are teaching the truth?
My beliefs became chains upon my soul;
I undressed shamelessly, dropping the veil.
I broke the statue that was made out of my beliefs.
I spat at their goodness!
I turned my back to all their ways and
I vanished from the make-believe state.
Every morsel of their beliefs I swallowed, until I could take no more.
So one by one we became a fool.
Nobody ever questioned or admitted that their beliefs were someone else’s beliefs or hearsay.
No one really explored what was truly real, so this world became the products of beliefs without any base to stand on.
A baby grows up with layers of beliefs, not living but being a puppet of fear, shame, hesitation, and that was good.
Well I say I have no use for all that I have ever learned thus far; to me they are infested with the unreal.
Victims of our own beliefs, all swimming in the ocean of falsehood, most don’t even know it.
The unlimited, the absolute, looking as confined as a rock.
What a joke!
We pay to buy the falsehood, ‘worldly knowledge’.
We become a bundle of desires, a slave to our beliefs.
We desire to be good, wealthy, healthy and ever young. Yet all along, we were perfection.
We had abundance; we were never born, so health was not even an issue.
Unlimited, timeless, absolute, acting bounded.
Now, this is absurd!

who i am not
July 20, 1999