Being that
Every now and then I hear about a Hindu religious concept which is used translated "Thou art that". Now, I now extraordinarily little about Hindu theology (and really just a little bit about Jewish theology and Christian theology -- enough, someone might say, to be dangerous). Strangely, the former resident of the attic room in my mother's house in Northampton, whom I don't believe to have been a Hindu, had put a big THOU ART THAT sticker up on the wall of the attic staircase. That room was my room, so almost every day when I lived with my mother I would walk up to my room at night and see THOU ART THAT, which I knew was a Hindu religious concept and of which I didn't (and don't) have much understanding otherwise.
When I was in Berkeley toward the end of September, I happened to walk by a protest and, as I often like to do, I asked for some protest literature. The protestors handed me a single-page flyer. As I was walking away, I started to read it, and I was absolutely horrified by the contents -- verging momentarily on "outraged", but mainly just horrified.
I folded up the flyer and put it in my pocket, and walked another block or two before I thought any more deeply about it. And what I suddenly realized was that, actually, I was that: it would have been very easy for me to have been one those protestors, to believe what they believed and to act as they were acting. Even more, it seemed to me that I had acted exactly as they were acting, and advocated (mutatis mutandis) what they were advocating. I saw a parallel between myself and those horrifying protestors which was so close that there was no reason not to call it an identity.
That's the clearest experience I've ever had of "Thou art that".
