The Open Mind

The Open Mind was awake. It was everywhere, and everything, all at once. It had either been there for ever & ever, or it had just started to be. It didn’t really matter which, since things like Time and Memory were all part of it, so any way you went about it, things all led back to the same place. I know that sounds a bit dicey, and there are very smart people who have formulas to prove one thing or another or a bunch of stuff in between, but they and their thoughts and mathematics and matter and measures and history were all part of it, too, so figuring it out was like herding cats. As pointless as it is impossible. So, anyway, the Open Mind was awake. And it was everything and everywhere all at once. Almost… Contained in the fabric of Everywhere were some impenetrable areas like little round ball bubbles. Some were quiet and smooth. Some were almost ethereal, as though they would become part of the Open Mind at anytime, dissolving in to the Entire Fabric with a refreshing breath of release, satisfying some certain longing that only the Open Mind could understand and appreciate. Of course, since Everything is part of the Open Mind, there was certainly enough refreshment to go around. Some of the little ball bubbles were hot beds of irritation, red and scratchy to look at or feel, and seemed almost to boil inside, like some festering thing, ready to explode. These were all part of the Open Mind, but separate somehow. While everything was part of the Open Mind, not all of it was under control by the same thought processes. The areas inside these little ball bubbles were special. They contained something called Free Will. The Open Mind could go and look around inside these ball bubbles by looking out through the eyes of any one of billions and billions of facets of itself that lived inside of many of these ball bubbles. It had to be careful doing this, because if it looked out the eyes of any one of these for more then what seemed like an instant, the others seemed to know, and act differently towards the one it looked through. The facet whose eyes it used would most certainly start acting funny. This could prove to be difficult and defeat the entire purpose of Free Will altogether, so the Open Mind would sort just peek around at specifics a little bit, from time to time, and occupy it self with being Everything All The Time, which is pretty much a full time job. Of course, any one of those billions and billions of facets could turn around and look out at the Open Mind, and watch Everything All The Time, too, but they hardly ever did. Go figure. Many of these ball bubbles grew like seeds, gestating at their own rate, developing according to their own basic guidelines, until they became one of those refreshing breaths of release, blending in to the Entire Fabric, further quenching the longing of the Open Mind, or they went the other way. They became so involved in their own inner festering, that they just burned away until they were but a hard and crispy little crust, which of course, couldn’t flow with the Entire Fabric, so they eventually just disintegrated back in to the Open Mind to be redeveloped at a later time. The Open Mind was used to this, as Every Part of Everything That Would Ever Happen was part of it, too. It came with the territory. So, anyway, during one of these occasional specific peeks inside one of the more troubled ball bubbles, the Open Mind saw that there had developed a New Facet, just within the last moment or so. They called themselves people, and they lived on a tiny speck in remote corner of this particular ball bubble, which they called The Universe. They thought that Everything In Existence was right there inside their particular ball bubble, and that the inside of this ball was actually the outside of everything else. As ridiculous as that may seem, they believed it, for the most part, and these people weren’t very accepting about new ideas. They even thought that the Open Mind lived entirely inside this tiny little ball bubble, The Universe, which was really so small that the Open Mind didn’t really give it much thought, except in an Open Mind Everything All The Time sort of way. They also had given the Open Mind a series of pet names, in a wide variety of languages, some of them even claiming that the Open Mind had a beard and robes. Being well groomed in Everything and wearing whatever it imagined All The Time, the Open Mind paid little attention to such vivid descriptions, knowing that these people were only seeing the Open Mind in terms they could understand; as themselves. The Open Mind loved all parts of itself equally, which is considered healthy, even those parts with Free Will that became irritated by themselves, sometimes. So it had a look inside this particular ball bubble to see what these momentary people were up too. Peering way down into that distant corner, deep inside the space within this tiny fragment of a ball bubble, the Open Mind could focus on the little sliver they called a Galaxy. There, just about where you’d expect, was their little solar system, and spinning around really fast, was their tiny blue ball of a world. Now, these people, as they’ve decided to call themselves, were mostly limited to just a few languages, some of them only one, which was disappointing, but even worse, they had decided not to trust too many of each other who looked and talked differently then whoever was doing the looking and listening. They had, in fact, divided up their tiny blue ball in to areas which were restricted to certain groups alone, and others had to ask permission to go there at all. Why anyone would want to visit such a place is too big a question to deal with here. Most unpleasant was the fighting they did with each other. It seemed to go on and on and on, destroying huge portions of their Blue Ball, and killing off vast numbers of these strange beings who had only moments ago been created and crawled out of holes in the rocks. What was really unbelievable was why they were doing it. Their use of the gift of Free Will was to claim that certain people had windows through which they could look and see the Open Mind. They said they ‘talked to it’ and that it ‘had a plan for them’. This was just plain silly, of course, as the Open Mind had created all of this to exercise Free Will in the first place, and these people used Free Will to take it away. Free Will, that is. So anyway, these momentary people would point at their own windows, calling them by various names and in a multitude of languages, and claim them to be the Only Window. This seemed to be what a great deal of the fighting was about. There was also a lot of trouble over stuff. Some people wanted more than they needed, and they hid it away to rot, while others got none. Not being a very nice way to get along, the Open Mind would have frowned on this, as it spread itself pretty equally Everywhere Forever, but that’s what Free Will is all about. At the moment, the Open Mind is waiting to see if this particular ball bubble with the littlest galaxy and the tiny blue ball will turn it’s momentary people around and begin to nourish their fellow creatures, habitat and future, eventually becoming a refreshing breath of release, and joining the rest of the Open Mind, or if it will just irritate itself into a crispy little crust and fade back into the Open Mind, for redevelopment at another time. The word on this is not yet in….