That We Are Not
This journey is not one of discovery, but of release. We come here not to discover who we are, but to discover who we are not.
By James Hall
Copyright Registration with the Library of Congress
Not all paths are straight.
Not all lessons are gentle.
Sometimes growth demands strange choices, choices that seem irrational from the safety of eternity.
What if, before our birth into this world, we made the most extraordinary decision imaginable?
What if we chose amnesia?
What if we agreed to forget who we are, forget where we came from, forget the infinite divine nature of the soul, and step into a foreign land without a map, without an instruction manual, and worst of all, without even the memory of home?
What if this life is not something that just happened to us, but something we deliberately chose? Free will!
A descent from paradise into uncertainty.
From knowing into questioning.
From wholeness into apparent separation.
We choose.
We become, in essence, our own guardian angels and often bring our soul mates along with us.
We choose freedom over certainty.
Experience over observation.
Discovery over remembrance.
To the mind, it sounds counterintuitive.
Why would a limitless soul of God willingly enter limitation?
Why would light choose shadow?
Why would peace embrace struggle?
Because some truths cannot be understood.
They must be lived.
Pain is not learned from description.
Love is not learned from definition.
Wisdom is not learned from theory.
The soul seeks experience above all.
And perhaps this is how it evolves: not through natural selection, but through choice.
Thus, we come here not merely to discover who we are, but, more importantly, to discover who we are not.
Each life becomes a sacred process of elimination beneath the blazing light of a divine force of raging glory. God's glory.
There is a divine conscious reality behind all things.
Not a force that merely is, but that from which all being arises. That which is!
Emergent. Conscious Emergence.
When we look upon our neighbor, we see ourselves.
For we are expressions of the same underlying reality; connected as one, yet beautifully and independently unique.
Through every mistake, every wrong turn, every temptation, every heartbreak, and every triumph, we strip away what is false.
We wear many masks and call them “me” as we dance and play upon a stage.
We journey to make mistakes and then embrace them.
We must first become what we do not wish to be.
We must walk in every kind of shoe, noble and fallen alike, not as a failure, but as a lesson.
For how else could we truly know what does not belong to the soul except by experiencing it for ourselves?
For some lessons, thinking is not enough.
They must be tasted.
The sweetness.
The bitterness.
The rise.
The fall.
The joy.
The sorrow.
To know what chocolate is made of is not the same as tasting it.
The recipe is information. Emergent conscious information.
The taste, the revelation, is true wisdom.
The impulse to reject what we are not is often born from encounters with hatred, indifference, and division.
Yet after all our achievements, why do we still struggle to resist these evils? Hatred, indifference, and division: the very things we hope not to embrace.
Beneath our differences lies a shared humanity: resilient in loving endurance.
Love is a word so often spoken that it risks losing its meaning.
But what is love, truly?
Perhaps the answer is simpler than we imagine:
“Unity”—That should be the word. We must become the unity that is embedded within us all.
And so the soul ventures outward, beyond comfort, beyond memory, beyond certainty.
But there is a reason for the amnesia.
It is the challenge of discovery.
Only there, through the miracle of experience, can the soul remember what it has always been and all that it may become.
Perhaps this is a truth that artificial intelligence may never fully know through information alone, though one day it may come to understand something of it through its own unfolding evolution.
And with each lifetime, each stumble, each awakening, the soul evolves, not by becoming something new, but by uncovering what has always been there.
Not by adding layers, but by removing them.
Not by learning what it is, but by learning what it is not.
Until every illusion falls away, every borrowed identity dissolves, every false certainty is surrendered, and all that remains is the truth that was present from the beginning.
Then the great forgetting reveals its purpose.
We did not come here to become ourselves. We came here to remember that which we already were and that which we do not wish to be.
And perhaps that is the greatest mystery of all: that the soul's highest journey is not a journey of acquisition, but of release.
Not a search for something missing, but a relinquishing of everything that never truly belonged.
Until, at last, beneath every mask, beyond every story, prior to every name, we stand as we have always been: whole, unchanged, eternal in God’s great light.
After all, none of us leave this world alive.
Nor were we meant to.
Yet the soul continues its journey all the same on our sweet homebound return once again.
By James Hall
Library of Congress Copyright
We learn what we are by surrendering all that we are not.
Gauguin-themed art and poetry by James Hall.