the shell of our understanding

psychologists and psychiatrists talk about cognitive dissonance: that humans, when confronted by a reality that does not comport with their own sense of understanding, experience a shock to their psyche, and in an effort to save their own sanity manufacture delusions to suppress the truth and hold on to what they know.

humans, in other words, deny reality. sometimes because of the horrors of the larger world, sometimes because of the irrationality of general society, sometimes because of the banality of the individual mundane, but invariably because of the existentialist crises arising from the disjunctures between what we know to be truth and what we insist on clinging to as fantasy. we generate lies and half-truths, make omissions and denials, become blind and deaf to fabricate a sense of existence that preserves our state of being. all so that we can protect our comfort with the known against our discomfort of the unknown.

in so doing, we hide. we hide within a shell of our own understanding demarcating the confines of our own making that we have chosen to be the limits of our own living. and the more we hide the more we harden our shell and the more we constrict our living, until we encase ourselves in our own tomb.

which is more than just unfortunate; it is supremely tragic.

because outside that shell is a universe, vast and infinite, as bright as the day is high and as bold as the night is deep, replete with sights and sounds and smells and flavors and feelings and forms of color and notes and fragrances and tastes and touch and emotions and experiences and sensations that create the glow of creation's echo and fill the void between the stars that shine as the messages of god's eternity as clear as the symphony that arises in the silence before the coming of the dawn gazing upwards to the heavens that know no end.

and that universe waits for us to speak its name and hear its voice and touch its face and feel its hand and enrich the palate of our lives so that we may come to know it is as we are: alive.

but to do so we cannot hide.

instead, we have to venture forth, beyond the known into the unknown.

and to do that, we have to break the shell of our understanding.

and to do that, we have to go outside our comfort zone.

and to do that, we have to accept our journeys of discovery.

so that with each step, each mile, each landmark, each passage into the furthest reaches of the distance that ultimately lead us to ourselves, we make another chink break another chip make another crack in the shell, until it shatters and divides, and finally frees us.

so that we can spread our wings and fly to the all the ends of all the far horizons that lie across all the senses of existence that grow to the sublime mysteries that pass beyond the known and go to the unknown until there is only the revelation of all that is the supremely sacred and all that is the supremely divine.

so that one day, we'll look back, and see once more the shell from whence we came, and hold it within our hands and look upon it and wonder how, once so long ago, we ever fit within it.

and then we'll know that we can never go back...nor would we ever want to.

and then we'll let it go.

and then we'll turn once more to life.