Are You Special?
You better believe you are because you are
This story is about the hijacked emotional hunger that drives this world. But first, let us get to the punchline. Are you special? Yes, you are. You are special from here to the sky, you are ecstatically special. And in a balanced, sane world, your being ecstatically special is not in any competition with everyone else being ecstatically special, too.
What does being special mean?
Being special is a feeling, not a status, no matter what the self-appointed salesmen of statuses want us to believe. Being special is a state of the soul. It’s a spiritual feeling of being loved and walking on air, a feeling that results from being aligned with our soul and being surrounded by energy that lovingly resonates with ours.
It’s a loving kiss from the spirit world, a sense of total harmony, a feeling of being honored, accepted, and thoroughly, actively loved—which, by the way, is how we are meant to be most of the time, when aligned with our soul and surrounded by others who are aligned with their souls, too.
Sadly, at the moment, very few are aligned with their souls. Many are walking in circles, hungry, hustling in very awkward ways for emotional nourishment, looking for validation from the people who are hungry, too.
One of the best talks ever given on the topic is this talk by the Dagara elder Sobonfu Some. I know I have shared it before but it is so perfect that I would share it every day.
Special soul assignments and special gifts
Personally, I am subscribed to the spiritual story told in many old cultures, according to which we come to this Earth with special, important, and useful tasks. It makes great sense to me.
If so, beating our chests about being more special than others is a strange affair. Yes, we are special because we have come here with a special task! Yes, we are special because we came here with gifts that are unique to us! Yes, we deserve to be treated with dignity and spiritual respect! Yes!
And so do they.
Ethnic prejudice: yikes
Ethnic prejudice is extremely convenient for the dominators. For example, when people go about “the Arabs,” it diverts the attention from the ugly fact that many leaders of the Arab nations are rather friendly with the CIA and throw their own people under the CIA bus every day. When people go about “the Jews,” it diverts the attention from the fact that many high-brow political Zionists are rather tight with the CIA, too, and have thrown their own under the same bus many times.
The actual problem is that we are all living under a mob of dominators. Living under a mob—no relief valve—leads to a build-up of frustration. Clever mob bosses create make-believe relief valves and redirect the anti-mob sentiment toward “the Arabs,” “the Jews,” “the Russians,” “the immigrants,” etc.
When I personally encounter ethnic prejudice, I feel sad. I can handle it, I can very easily have conversations with all sorts of prejudiced people without frothing at my mouth. I’ve seen every kind of ethnic prejudice under the sun, so I am shocked by none. But on the inside, I mourn all of it. In addition to that, I despise it when politicians create more prejudice by stomping on logic and saying that one kind of prejudice is uglier than another kind of prejudice—thus turning the “anti-prejudice” sentiment into a domination tool. (Guess what happens when frustrated people feel with their gut that preferential treatment of prejudice is BS? They get more prejudiced against the fellow human beings who belong to the “special” group. And under the bus, the fellow human beings go—and history repeats. Guess what doesn’t happen as people act out their frustrations on others? Absolutely nothing happens to the mob!!!!!)
Here is how I feel about it. When left to their own devices—without politicians, without scammer theologians, without Bad Witches, and without various spies—people usually find ways to get along. Yes, they may make fun of each other’s funny accents or unacceptable hairstyles—fine—but where it matters, people tend to get along.
I believe that clans and nations are like people, and the members of each clan likely share a destiny and perhaps some quirks, and perhaps are in charge of giving love to specific parts of the beautiful puzzle that this world is—but there is no doubt in my mind that the exclusivity myths that various powerful tricksters use for wars and genocides are lies. Their lies may be packaged as political stories or theological stories—but that doesn’t change the fact that they are, to my senses, blatant lies.
Every nation and every clan that is still around has been raped with great cruelty—horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and in every each way—many times. Is any rapee more specially raped than any other rapee? Please don’t break my heart.
Exclusivity myths: the marketing brochure of the Machine
My approach is simple: I distinguish between the people and the Machine. I am in love with the people—and I don’t give two rats about the Machine, or the egos of the defenders of the Machine, or the mythology that fuels the Machine.
I respect the souls, I don’t have any kind words for the tricksters and the dominators, and I don’t care for anyone’s talking points, including my own. In addition to that, I feel zero affection for any mobs or any structures of domination, be it this state, that state, this church, that church… no affection at all. We all live with (or rather under) various mobs to the extent that we have to maneuver around in today’s world—but I don’t think that human dignity requires an existence of the Machine. That’s a Machine operator’s marketing trick. To my senses, the manufactured emotional link between dignity and access to “our” Machine (is it really ours?) is like the manufactured emotional link between dignity and preferred pronouns.
The Machine, however, is very good at protecting itself by pushing exclusivity myths and throwing all people under the bus. Let us look at a few exclusivity myths, and I would like to start with the exclusivity myth I grew up with, the Russian one.
It goes something like this: “We are a mysterious culture, not quite Europe, and not quite Asia. Our land is big, and our soul is deep. We are drunk and f*cked up but we are this way because we are spiritual. We are not like the West over there, the shallow, polished, super sellout, non-philosophical West. Yes, we are drunk—but we are drunk philosophically and proudly, and God is with us.”
The historical reality though is that my people, my beautiful people, have been thrown under the bus centuries ago, and never allowed to leave from under the bus. My people have been invaded again and again by different ambitious kings, and raped, and pillaged, and ruled with cruelty, and force-converted to Christianity against their will, and enslaved (serfdom was abolished in 1861). There was a short break for the peasants after the abolishing of serfdom, and the peasants finally raised their heads and started living with dignity—but immediately came the industrial revolution, and World War I, and the Bolshevik coup, and communist regime, and forced industrialization and electrification, and collectivization, and World War II, etc. etc. So the entire history of my people for many centuries is a history of living under the boot. Whom does the Russian “holy defeated passivity” myth work for, the people or the owner of the boot? Methinks, it’s the boot.
On a personal note, it was the Russian gloom that compelled me to relocate to the U.S. I love my people very much—and I mourn the abuse—but I couldn’t stand the gloom. Too much gloom.
Now, it seems like every clan has an exclusivity myth, and I suspect that, just like the Russian exclusivity myth, those are artifacts of the Machine. The Chinese word for “China” is “Zhōngguó” (“Central State,” “Middle Land.”) The word “barbarian” comes from the Greek word “βάρβαρος” roughing meaning “non-Greek.” On a side note, the word “pagan” comes from Latin “pagani,” meaning “rural folk.”
Then we have a whole “line” of exclusivity myths sold to the people by various political opportunists under the Judeo-Christian brand. Personally, I am not subscribed to any of them, despite some theological perks—namely, the fact that, according to the Russian faction, access to heaven is reserved for the followers of the Russian Orthodox church. (Did you know? Yeah we Russians have connections up there. :)
Jokes aside, I mourn the Judeo-Christian exclusivity myth with all my heart. I believe it’s a trap—both spiritual and practical—a trap. I don’t think that God ever selected any clan to dominate other clans, or steal from other clans, or preside over other clans, or babysit other clans, let alone kill other clans. People do all those things because people want to do all those things every now and then—but it has nothing to do with God. I also don’t think that God checks the “theological papers” at the gate. Unlike the politicians, God is not a totalitarian and not a segregationist. And if one wants to believe in a jealous, segregationist God, it is their right to believe in a jealous, segregationist God. On my end, I feel that God is love.
Besides, every clan or group is spiritually selected for something good. It is hard to imagine even a half-functional human parent producing many children and then compelling one child to be mean to another—so I can’t be convinced that God ever did that. And just like I am not subscribed to the story about the spiritualness of letting go of all ambition and just drinking, I am not subscribed to the story of being called by God to kill and enslave. And I am sad. I am so, so sad about all the people slain “in the name of God,” and I am sad for the slayers who were tricked to practice hubris and thus thrown—with great callousness—under a karmic bus.
It could have been so beautiful, our world could have been so beautiful, with all of us carrying our special spiritual relations and giving our total love to the parts of the puzzle that is special to us! Instead, we ended up with this (told by a 16th century missionary, by the way). Here is a excerpt from Bartolomé de Las Casas:
Our shared ancestry. Our bloody history. Our bleeding hearts.
A million ancestors
When I first thought about it, the beauty of it blew my mind. For any of us to walk this Earth today, a million blood ancestors had to walk the Earth just twenty generations ago! A million people, for one humble me! And for the wonderful you, and for that stranger guy over there!
By logic, we may want to account for the “pedigree collapse” described below … but even so.
Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Keep doubling back through the generations — 16, 32, 64, 128 — and within a few hundred years you have thousands of ancestors.
It’s nothing more than exponential growth combined with the facts of life. By the 15th century you’ve got a million ancestors. By the 13th you’ve got a billion. Sometime around the 9th century — just 40 generations ago — the number tops a trillion.
But wait. How could anybody — much less everybody — alive today have had a trillion ancestors living during the 9th century?
The answer is, they didn’t. Imagine there was a man living 1,200 years ago whose daughter was your mother’s 36th great-grandmother, and whose son was your father’s 36th great-grandfather. That would put him on two branches on your family tree, one on your mother’s side and one on your father’s.
In fact, most of the people who lived 1,200 years ago appear not twice, but thousands of times on our family trees, because there were only 200 million people on Earth back then. Simple division — a trillion divided by 200 million — shows that on average each person back then would appear 5,000 times on the family tree of every single individual living today.
Bottom line, if we go back in time far enough, we’ll see that we are all related in the most immediate, literal, biological sense. So when people degrade each other based on ancestry, they degrade a part of themselves. Time to wise up, no?
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This is the message we need to hear. Appreciate seeing it written with clarity, from the heart.
Wonderful way of articulating this issues that has plagued humanity for millennia. We’re all special in the eyes of God our creator; but no one tribe is better than another’s. This “religion” has ruined the world and Gos must be shaking his head in heaven thinking “oh children, you’ve got it all wrong!”