by Jamie Blackband

You are my entirety. No part of me is apart from you. There is no soul, there is no
spirit. There is no chi, no ghost, and no lan vital theres just you, a sack of meat
with twists and turns and coils, holding it all.
I want only for what you want. I see only what you show me. I hear only what you
let me hear, taste only what you let me taste and above all, feel only what you felt
I should feel. My consciousness is your creation. Therefore, my entirety is you.
Why should I despair my lack of soul? The soul is just an ethereal concept that I
could never hope to understand, a ghost story that tries but fails to explain what I
am. Say soul and I can see only abstract nothingness. I come no closer to knowing
the nature of my mind.
But then theres you a physical, tangible force for of life. You are my mind. Nothing
else is required. I need not look into the cosmic void and hope the engine of my
being lurks in the shadows instead, I can put my palm to my head and know that
between a slim barrier of skin and skull, you are down here with me.
Through you, I will be able to understand you. What an amazing thought. There
then! Cast the soul into the abyss of antiquated ideas. The brain is enough.
Molded in the crucible of evolution, you rose far above the rest. Now, thousands of
generations later, you have helped us to transcend evolution itself. We invented
shelter that protected us from the elements tools that lifted us from our animal
limitations medicine that triumphed over the threat of death. All thanks to you.
Your chugging and churning enabled us to think, to imagine, to dream, and to
wonder. Through your creation, we create.
You, so humble, have continued your work for hundreds of centuries, and never
asked for our recognition. In fact, you yourself have pushed us away from you.
Before knowing you, we would believe anything to explain ourselves invisible men,
transparent spirits, nonphysicaland nonphysical puppeteers using our bodies as
pawns in some cosmic battle of morality unware that what seemed so far over our
heads was actually within them. With the imagination you gave us, we have chased
visions of the fictional to explain our inner worlds, while you, the real driver of the
conscious world, have been whispering in the background, unnoticed. Until now.
You move us forward by constantly bombarding us with thoughts, firing even when
we dont know it. When we only want sleep, you keep going, unwilling to slow down,
and we stare at the ceiling for another restless night, cursed with your ceaseless
invention.
As the creator of our highest highs, you are also the culprit of our lowest lows. We
pay the toll for your happiness and transcendence with your more common
sensations of pain and suffering. And we must bear them every day, unrelenting,
until over time we can bear them no more. Your creation, our burden.
But as a torch can be heavy and weathering to hold, we must remember that it
gives us light. So too should we carry you, our consciousness knowing that you
alone can illuminate the cavern before us.
And that cavern is large. Compared to the universe, you are small. We live on a
pebble soaring around a furnace, one of a hundred billion stars in this galaxy, one of
two trillion galaxies in this universe. Upon viewing this vast expanse, we can only
look back at you, and wonder about how you fit into this larger picture.
While the scale of universe should astound us, we must remember that it is not
greater than us. Can a black hole speak what it feels? No. As far as we know, we are
the rarest physical phenomena out there: that which can reflect on its role in the
universe, can experience such complicated emotions as happiness and suffering.
No, it is not the same destructive power as that of a black hole, but it is an
immense power nonetheless.
We can only hope to harness this power by turning to you to learn as much as we
can about your inner workings. We wrestle with you every day, and yet we know so
little about you. You are mysterious, but you are not impossible.
We once believed that you were only ethereal. But now we know that you are here
on Earth, an ever-present map of the worlds within us, just waiting to be read. And
with you, my brain I feel we can walk this world together.
You and I. My brain and me. And on our journey, I pray that, together, well find
some peace of mind.