BEHIND THE VEIL

When Elsa was first conceived, her parents immediately invited her behind the veil. She was still just feelings and connections but she felt the subtle shift from all of life to all of life and something else. As she grew in the womb, the something else made itself more apparent through some of the food coming through the umbilical cord that she could not sense, leaving unknowns in her body, and from the sound of her mother and father talking and other strange noises that Elsa could not connect with life. When her parents argued, the feelings were cold and hard and made Elsa uneasy, even though she was still mostly life and her comfort came from this connection. Her mother's body was a mixture of life and the something else but there was enough life for Elsa to grow and develop.

When Elsa was born, there was the life of her mother but everything else was the something else, cold, bright and harsh. Then her father's life was a comfort as he held her and she felt his breath and the warmth of his skin merging with the life of her. As she grew, her parents reiterated their invitations to join them behind the veil and Elsa gradually became more comfortable with the something else as they swathed her in blankets, put her in cots and strollers, gave her toys and ferried her around in the car. When she buried her face in the dog's fur she still felt all of life coursing through her and her joy made her squeal and giggle but she also giggled at the bright, noisy something elses that her parents offered her, following their lead as their focus conveyed to her the importance of the choices they were giving her.

Sky, trees, sea and sand all reminded her of the life that she was but the foreign feeling of the something else began to fade and Elsa became equally comfortable with life and the something else, especially as her home, her bed, and the stories her parents read her all conveyed the love her parents had for her. When they gave her a baby-chino with a marshmallow on top, she felt their love in her heart as much as her body was feeling the adverse affects of the milk and marshmallows.

Elsa began to recognise some of the sounds her parents made as they spoke to her and to associate some of the noises with things or routines. As she became more and more familiar with the noises and began to form the words, the words began to form her world. When she looked at a flower and said, "Daisy," she no longer felt the information of all of life being offered to her by the flower because now the flower was a "daisy", just like the two dimensional drawings of daisies on her wallpaper. It was no longer a unique, original life form with a unique, sensory experience for Elsa to absorb and connect with. She still had sensory experiences with a rose as she filled her nose with its scent, she still felt the power of the life of the ocean as the edge of the waves rippled over her feet, and she still felt the heart of the dog when she lay with him, but the connection was getting cloudy as more and more of the words she was learning confused her senses and busied themselves in her head.

Behind the veil was coaxing her, tempting her, encouraging her and lulling her to nestle her life in its treacherous embrace. Her life, the life in her body, was being encased by the rings of words, sounds, sensations, vibrations and things to the point where she saw her life as separate from her parents lives and her grandparents lives and every other life. She was no longer life, she was one life among other lives.

It was this separate life that she took to preschool and then school to learn more words that became busy in her head, and to exchange with fun, separate friends, to send her into excitement for a future party or sleepover that wasn't in the present so that she was no longer in the present where life always is. Slowly, with the guidance of all around her, Elsa was withdrawing her life from life, just like everyone else behind the veil. It had all happened so gradually that she had hardly felt a thing. She hadn't felt the death of life in all the plastic toys and the books she loved. She hadn't sensed the anguish of the animals she learned to consume at dinner and she didn't notice that everything that formed the backdrop to life in the something else came from life that had been altered and destroyed because it was all coated with the love of those around her that made it seem alright. She was learning destruction alongside her a,b,c,1,2,3 and she was learning not to feel it.

Elsa walked the well-trodden path of school and university fed to her by words and more words that she dived into each day to swim the seas of alphabets that defined everything behind the veil. By now aware of pollution and the effects of consumerism and materialism on the natural world, all brought to her by more words, she was determined to be a change for good. She wanted to stand up for nature, and for the indigenous, to walk more lightly on the earth, to grow food and live sustainably. It was an obvious choice to her and she thought, "How hard can it be?"

She went to environmental protests, signed petitions, bought second hand clothes, saved up for a Permaculture course and was converted. She decided she wanted to Do No Harm to life so she started examining how her life was causing harm; breeding and killing animals for consumption - that one was easy, she stopped eating meat and then eggs and milk when she learnt of the suffering of dairy cows and battery hens. She rode a bicycle instead of driving a car but knew this would not be possible if she lived in a rural area as she planned so it was not really a problem solved. She cut down on plastic wherever possible, bought bulk foods, recycled and re-purposed as much as she could, took public transport when the bike wouldn't do and experimented with a bit of dumpster diving but it was never enough; the harm marched on and Elsa began to look more closely at its mechanisms.

Reading more words, Elsa learnt about money creation and how a handful of investment companies owned all other investment companies and therefore, everything behind the veil. She realised that everything behind the veil was as intrinsically linked as the connections between all of life but that, whereas all of the life of nature contributed to keeping nature rolling along, everything behind the veil needed the men, women and children living there to be the cogs keeping the wheels turning so those at the top can maintain power and control over everyone.

Just the pen she held in her hand needed a vast army of designers, manufacturers, transporters, administrators, bankers, cleaners, road menders, lawyers, politicians, law enforcement, builders, architects, engineers, tradespeople and on and on and on. Just for one pen. Suddenly the enormity of what she wanted to do came upon her; if just holding a pen caused such harm, then so did going to a cafe, reading a book, buying anything, going anywhere. Everything behind the veil was linked to harm.

Excitedly, she discussed this with her environmental friends and they shared long discussions. But when Elsa declared that, to really stop the harm meant walking away from everything behind the veil, the eyes of her friends glazed over and their agreements became more half-hearted and theoretical. Yes, they wanted to save the earth but could they really give up travel, transport, money, medicine, technology, etc, could anyone? Even Elsa, with her determination and zeal saw the mountain to be climbed. "But, if we keep going the way we are, we will destroy everything we need to live," she reasoned, "So we have to find a way or we won't be around anyway."

During all this time of environmentalism, Elsa had also been living life, falling in and out of love, finding out that people don't always say what they mean or mean what they say, that they don't always follow through on their commitments, that their good hearted intentions don't always result in action and that the good hearted intentions don't stop the harm when they are still embedded behind the veil. She was still passionate about stopping the harm but confused by the seeming impossibility of it. She became ill for a while and went to stay with her parents while she recovered. They had retired to the country and their summer garden was peaceful, full of colours, birds and wildlife so she spent a lot of time resting outside.

The dog she had grown up with was dead but another had taken his place and she often stayed with Elsa in the garden, wondering around, sniffing, rolling in the grass and lying in the sun or the shade depending on the temperature. Elsa watched the way her focus was so intense and present. When the dog had her nose to the grass, her concentration was absolute. Her nose was the connection of her whole body to the smell that was the whole story of the life of that spot connected to the whole of life everywhere. The dog was plugged into life through her nose. Elsa started watching the other animals in the garden; the way the birds flew, swooped, perched and sang, the way the lizards crept out from behind rocks to sun on the path and the beetles, flies, ladybirds and bees all went about their business, like people in a city but with a connection to life that was constant and eternally present.

With little to do besides rest, Elsa began to notice the words rushing around her brain making up an ear-splitting roar of thoughts, ideas, dreams, recollections, rules, feelings, longings, fears and uncertainty. "How quiet must it be without the words", she thought. Was this why the dog had such concentration, why the whole of the dog's body was absorbed in the information she was receiving from the smell, why the wren knew exactly where to go for food and for shelter, how the bee found its flowers and how the flowers called to the bees? How did nature just know what to do and where to go? How did it all thrive, not just survive, without everything behind the veil that Elsa and her friends and family were so reliant on?

Even in the city, Elsa noticed how nature refused to be defeated; weeds would spring up in a crack in the pavement, a sapling in an alleyway would funnel all its energy into reaching up tall and thin as it searched for the sun and ants excavated any spot with a bit of loose earth or sand. Nature never gave up trying to heal the sores and wounds created by people with their endless needs and justified wants.

Elsa put her nose into flowers and observed the chatter stopping her from focusing only on the scent. She looked at the wren and tried to block out anything else to fully absorb the information she was getting, which didn't extend to much beyond the bird's appearance. She watched newly born calves in the field next door wobbling to their feet and latching onto their mothers, already knowing what to do because they came with the connection to earth, to the grass, the sun, the sky, their mothers and the rest of the herd. She thought back to being a baby; did she know what to do? She supposed babies mostly knew how to latch on to their mothers' breasts by instinct, but what else was natural about their births? In a room with lights and plastic, metal, alien sounds, unfamiliar voices, so many words, words, words. She could not remember being born but early childhood memories of lying with the dog on the lawn gazing up at the trees above and the clouds beyond brought snippets of sensations of connection without distraction and clutter. Other memories of her father holding her in the sea and of feeling no separation between him and her.

When had this changed? When had she started to see herself as separate from everyone else? She remembered travelling in the car with her parents when she was young and, with surprise, seeing them as separate, other beings, not Elsa. Once she had felt herself to be separate, that feeling had never gone away. The words circling around her made sure of that. In the garden, the dog came over and buried her face in Elsa's lap. Elsa imagined connections from her body to the dog, the grass, the trees, the birds, the ladybird on the nearby leaf. She imagined the networks of fungi under the forests connecting the trees, an information highway of life, and tried to plug herself in.

As always, her attempt to focus the whole of her life into the moment of connection was smashed by the words and thoughts claiming her brain; labels for everything she was looking at, random thoughts of a party, a boyfriend, something she needed from the shops, facts she had learned about nature, consciousness, freedom, what she had for breakfast, schoolgirl memories, an island beach and plans for do no harm living jostled, collided and elbowed each other in a competition for her attention. They jumped over each other to get to the forefront of her brain, were shoved out of the way by others, appeared only as a glimpse or a snippet not fully formed but with a feeling attached, or grumbled along in the background barely making an impression. Where did they all come from, Elsa wondered? As she let her thoughts rampage, she observed.

All those thoughts, she realised, belonged behind the veil. The dog, the calves and all the other animals and plants in the garden were existing alongside everything behind the veil but they didn't have the thoughts and the associations with thoughts to keep them plugged into behind the veil as Elsa was. Elsa had learnt to be more strongly connected with behind the veil than with life, even though life was who she was. Her body held her physical life and needed life to do so but her brain had been taken over by words, thoughts and ideas that were not of life, all of them taught to her by others with the same words, thoughts and ideas inside their heads. The calf's mother showed her calf how to behave in the herd and kept her safe but the cow wasn't putting anything inside the brain of the calf. She was not being taught that what she ate was called grass, that what kept her warm was called the sun, that the sustenance she got from her mother was called milk. They just were and she just was, here and now without a past or a future but with a constant connection to life.

Elsa began to see with more clarity why she and her friends, all of whom were concerned about the harm being done to earth, were unable to see a way out from behind the veil. Nothing that had been put in their brains by all those around them behind the veil would help them feel their true connection with life and they all felt a stronger pull to everything behind the veil than they did to life. She supposed that the few indigenous tribes who had not been assimilated behind the veil had a stronger connection to life than anything else but everyone else was trapped and, no matter how strong their intentions to heal the earth and how much their good hearts wanted to make a difference, they were still governed by the words in their heads that kept them behind the veil even if they lived off grid, grew their food and didn't watch television. Their good hearts and good intentions were not enough because they were still putting their energy into behind the veil so it continued to suck the life out of them.

Where were these words? Where were these thoughts? There was no way for Elsa to see them or touch, taste, hear, smell or feel them. She could touch the grass, see the trees, smell the dog, hear the birds, taste the fruit and feel, or sense, when someone was happy or sad, angry or tired. But words? They were just spinning around her head and everyone else's head, dictating her choices, worrying her, making her afraid, hopeful, doubtful, joyful and every other emotion that could change with a different set of words. Where was the power behind the words coming from? Where did words come from?

Thinking about her own lack of connection to the life she was observing, Elsa thought that words must be there to describe something we can no longer feel, as in dog, tree, bird, but then what about the words plastic, steel, concrete? These were words for things that are no longer life but have been made by taking the life out of life to create something dead. Then there were concepts and constructs that we cannot touch or taste; bank, law, gravity, money, equality, justice, etc. All of these were just ideas made up by someone and taught to the rest of us to persuade us to include them in our thinking and, therefore, how we live. Elsa's brain was beginning to hurt and the sun was drifting behind the trees, so she went inside to help her mother with dinner.

The next day, Elsa returned to the topic. Did a thought exist? Hello, thought, where are you? She would never get a response. What about a bank? Hello, bank! Nothing. There was a building in the town, made from stone, steel and concrete but how was it a bank? It was a bank only because we have all accepted the idea of a bank and we have all agreed to call it a bank and have all accepted that a bank is the name for the place you go to deal with money matters but, of course, money is also a concept that we have all decided to go along with, even though it doesn't really exist. Hello, money! Nothing. Hello politics! Nothing. Elsa was beginning to work out the difference between life and behind the veil.

Behind the veil was just the ideas of people who have persuaded us to go along with them and act as if they exist when they don't. Because they have no life, we have to take bits of life and change them so they represent the ideas. We have become so good at this that we now believe that the ideas, concepts and the physical and material representations of the ideas and concepts that we build are real when they are not. And because they are not real, we have to work for them. A wild animal does not need us to do anything for them except leave them and their environment alone. A bank needs men and women to act as the tellers, managers, security guards, and customers to seem to exist. Just like the pen, the building, running and maintenance of the bank needs many thousands of men and women to be involved but the eagle needs no one. Elsa could see that everything behind the veil needs us to perform for it, to be the bank teller, the lawyer and the teacher, but also to believe in the concepts and constructs so we keep making them seem real, even though none of them had any life in them to connect them to life.

At last Elsa was beginning to comprehend why people were so disconnected from life; everyone was growing up in a world of make-believe, of fiction, of ideas that had no reality in life but that they were so accustomed to that life without them seemed impossible. Indeed, life without them would be impossible for most people; only those still living traditional lives on the land or those skilled in bush survival would be able to live without everything behind the veil. And if everything of behind the veil was causing harm to life, then it was impossible to live without causing harm.

Elsa sat very still. There was nothing behind the veil that did not cause harm, even all the good works of those with good intentions who fed and clothed the poor, rescued animals, saved lives in the hospitals, worked with alcoholics and drug addicts, took care of the young and the old, or even just worked hard to provide a secure home for their family. All those people working with the best of intentions were only ever able to put band-aids on the weeping sores of the deep wound that was behind the veil, and nothing they did would ever change everything for the better because everything about their lifestyles was contributing to the harm. As much as they tried to help, they were the problem.

All those who loved to go to the national parks, beaches and mountains but drove their cars there. All those parents who loved their children but invited them behind the veil to be part of the harm, just as Elsa's parents had done to her, all with the best of intentions. Elsa was pacing up and down the garden now, her head screaming with all the ways that we do harm even as we try to stop harm and even as we think we love life and nature, round and round in a vicious cycle. She had thought that stopping the harm was as simple as living off grid and growing her food but now she realised that, even then, she would still be reliant on everything behind the veil for a car, the roads, tools, supplies, a vet if her animals became sick, a government to make the laws that said she could buy the land, banks and the system of commerce for her to be able to buy the land, and law enforcement to protect the land as hers, should someone else try to claim it.

Would the land really be hers anyway? If land was life, how could she own it? Was the Title Deed to land the same as the land? A Title Deed was just a concept, an idea that someone had made up to lay claim to a piece of land but the deed was not the land itself because the land knew nothing of lots, plots and boundaries and none of the life on the land, the plants, the trees, the birds and the animals, were able to sense a Title Deed the way they could sense the wind, the rain and the sun. A Title Deed was no longer even a piece of paper that they could see and smell because it was now all electronic.

Nothing of life on the land knew that this bit belonged to one person and that bit belonged to another because there is no ownership in life. Again, Elsa could see that a deed was just people trying to stamp a concept from behind the veil onto the land. It seemed to her that this ownership of land was one of the main problems of behind the veil because hadn't indigenous people all across earth lived peacefully on the land without ownership until behind the veil came along and introduced the concept of ownership? Tribes of indigenous people once roamed freely across all of earth, but now that people owned blocks of land, it was hard to roam and most indigenous peoples were disenfranchised and traumatised because their connection to life had been broken. With ownership, some people controlled millions of acres while others didn't have anywhere safe to rest their heads at night.

Everything of behind the veil was like that; for some to have money and a lavish lifestyle, there had to be others that didn't so they could provide the lavish lifestyle. If everyone were rich, if everyone had a billion dollars, there would be nowhere to spend it, no cruises to go on, no yachts to buy, no resorts to go to or restaurants to dine at because no one would need to be working. Everything would collapse. It wasn't just the rich who relied on others to provide them with their luxuries; at every socio economic level, people were dependant on others to maintain their lifestyles, be they poor, middle or rich.

Everyone needed their bins emptied, food in the shops, bus drivers, street cleaners and road menders. Even the homeless man needed someone to work in a shop to sell him something to eat, or give him a meal at a soup kitchen, which meant he needed someone to grow or process the food, build the premises, provide the technology, manufacture clothing for the employees or volunteers ....... and on and on and on.

Like all children at school, Elsa had been sold the story that anyone could succeed if they worked hard enough but now she realised that this was a lie. The continuation of behind the veil relied on some living at the top, some living at the bottom and every level in between. Not everyone could succeed or behind the veil would collapse. Behind the veil, there would always be poverty, starvation, scarcity and want, just as there would always be opulence, extravagance, greed and waste because each depended on the other, and both of these situations brought out cruelty, desperation, suspicion and envy, making it hard for people to trust one another and work together.

Elsa had spent time in an off grid community and a commune, both of them groups of people sharing the land, growing the food and working together and in each she had observed how easy it was for egos to go to war, for power trips to wrestle for control, for fears, doubts and uncertainty to take over the good intentions and inspiration for being there in the first place. It seemed that a community worked only where there was a narrow dictate of shared beliefs that kept most out, resulting in a group of very like-minded people who all followed a set of rules, or if the community was mostly members of wider family groups where the trust had been established for many years.

Many depended on ownership with families buying in and all of them were still dependant on behind the veil. In a group of people it was natural for some to be stronger, be leaders and for some to be more content to follow along but the problem that Elsa had witnessed was that it was sometimes hard for the natural leaders to let go of control and allow others to take responsibility for things and it was easy for the followers to turn around and blame the leaders when they were not happy with something, even though they had been quite happy to sit back and let others make things happen.

It was so easy for the emotions to take over. Elsa looked back at the relationships she had had and how the goodwill and excitement of a new relationship had been taken over by patterns of behaviour that nearly all had come as baggage that had nothing to do with the partner at the time. Elsa looked back at arguments she had had, hurt feelings and upsets. What had they really been about? Had the hurt feelings really been from her partner saying something with the intention to hurt her or had the hurt come from a previous memory, an experience where she had taken on the comments of others to mean she was not good enough or pretty enough or clever enough, even if that had not been the original intention behind the words?

When her partner's behaviour reminded her of a situation where she had previously been hurt, she had assumed her partner had the same intention but was that just her projection onto him that caused her to miss his real intention? Elsa began to see that she had been making him responsible for how she felt so she was able to blame him for her hurt and upset when it was just a choice on her part to feel that hurt and upset in the first place. It was not the words that had the power; it was the emotion each person attached to the words that had the power, and how long they held onto the emotion was how long the words maintained their power.

"If I were talking to a hundred people,"she thought, "some of them might feel sad, some of them might feel happy, some of them might feel angry and I wouldn't be able to control any of it because their reactions would all be based on their past experiences, not on what I am actually saying. All of us behind the veil are going round blaming each other here, there and everywhere for what we feel but we have a choice as to how we perceive a situation and we have a responsibility not to dump our perceptions and assumptions onto others. This is why we have all become so separated from each other, why so many are so isolated, whether by choice or otherwise, and why so many communities don't work unless they have set rules. We have become blaming machines, victims of everyone and everything around us.

We do not see this in life. The squirrel doesn't blame the pine tree for not having enough cones, the ducks don't blame the wind for chasing away the rain, the baby doesn't even blame its mother when there is not enough to eat. When an animal is hurt, it doesn't sue, when a tree falls down it doesn't blame the earth for not holding it upright longer. An animal is not traumatised in nature; it is only when an animal is exposed to the cruelty, thoughtlessness and indifference of those who place more importance on make believe concepts and their manifestations than on life that animals become traumatised like people behind the veil. It is this worship of the not real that is doing all the harm to the real."

"The problem with life behind the veil," thought Elsa, "Is that we are all taught to focus on ourselves and what we want, no matter how detrimental it is to the earth and those around us. The magpie doesn't think about its self because it doesn't have the words that make up the thoughts of a self and its importance. And when we are thinking about our self and its importance, we forget about the harm we are causing for our self to have what it wants because the self is what we are focusing on and the self only exists behind the veil and, therefore, can only cause harm to life like everything else behind the veil.

We think the self made up of all the words we have been taught is who we really are but that self has nothing to do with real life, which is why none of the trees or plants or animals or birds have a self that they think about and dream for and buy for. They are not SELF centred and they are not selfish; they just take what they need, nothing more. They do not try to control the environment around them or force others to fit into the environment they control or force others to provide them with what they need. They just do what they do and, generally, everything they do contributes to the life that they are part of. People do what they do behind the veil and everything they do contributes to the destruction of life."

As Elsa sat and watched the birds flying in and out of a nest in a tree and the bees buzzing in and out of flowers, she could feel that she was becoming clearer and this clarity was bringing calmness, despite the enormity of what she was realising. She wanted to think about solutions but sensed that there was more to unravel. Where did it all come from? Where did the words come from? Whose idea was it to create them and how did they come to have so much power over everyone? Elsa had already realised that nothing happens without intention so there must have been an intention by someone to create the beginnings of behind the veil and, once it started, once people started relying on others to tell them what to think, what to feel and how to act, behind the veil would have taken on a motion of its own, albeit guided and manipulated by those at the top.

If those at the top controlled just about every facet of behind the veil, they certainly contolled the information that was getting to the people and made sure it all contributed to massaging everyone's brains into accepting and continuing life behind the veil. It made sense, therefore, that any information that led to people looking for something else outside behind the veil, would be suppressed and that any information that allowed people to think they were getting away from everything even as they remained trapped, would be allowed to flourish.

It also made sense that there would be rabbit holes for people who were not happy with behind the veil to get lost in as they looked for solutions; to those at the top, it would not matter how much the people protested or fought them in the courts, or set up permaculture farms or tried to stop the fracking. All that mattered was that their attention and, therefore, their energy, remained behind the veil because, if everyone withdrew their energy from behind the veil, it would cease to exist.

"If there is an intention to keep people locked into a way of thinking that destroys the life that we are, then that intention is certainly malevolent," Elsa thought. "And that intention clearly must benefit those who are controlling behind the veil and gaining all the benefits of complete power and control over everyone and everything." In her research, Elsa had come across information about trauma being connected to letters and words through sexual abuse and sacrifice but she had not looked into it much.

But now she thought that, if you wanted to have complete control over others, you had to be able to control their thinking all the while persuading them that they actually had freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of action, and you also had to be in control of their emotions so you could produce a fear reaction, such as when a police car puts on its lights behind you, or a joy reaction, such as when people participated in a huge concert, or festival. Different groups, nationalities, races, genders and religions were all pitted against each other behind the veil, preventing them from ever turning on the real enemies of the people, those who orchestrated everything.

All the emotions, the hatred, anger, dissatisfaction, even the joy and excitement, were being used to maintain the connection of the people to behind the veil because when they felt connected, they gave their energy, whether willingly or otherwise, and all this, the energy and the emotion, was being harvested to maintain behind the veil and the power and control those at the top had over everyone trapped in it. Subconsciously, everyone was performing for behind the veil, even if they thought they were working against the status quo because they could still be controlled by their emotions and they were still allowing their energy to be harvested.

So many people claimed they wanted to be free but real freedom is full responsibility and most people ran straight back to the institutions and establishments of behind the veil to demand a fix when things got hard. No one behind the veil learns what taking full responsibility for their lives really means and most people are working so hard just to have a roof over their heads and feed their families that they don't have time to think about it. And because they love their families, they don't want to jeopardise the security of them having a comfortable bed and something to eat every day, even though there is no real security behind the veil as the bank can call in a mortgage at any time, and the landlord can give you notice on your already short lease, and if you become sick, who looks after your family?

Elsa realised the privileged position she was in; her parents had a home that she had been able to come to when she needed to rest. She had no dependants to care for and no responsibilities in terms of mortgages, loans or contracts so she was able to sit and contemplate, taking time to digest everything she had learned and form a bigger picture of what was happening to everyone and, she hoped, to come up with a solution. Most people did not have that opportunity; they were usually so busy earning a living that they didn't have the energy to work out what had happened to them and what to do about it. Their good hearts full of good intentions did nothing if they did not have the consciousness of the good heart of all of life to realise the full extent of their actions upon the life that they were part of.

Nothing behind the veil had been created from the good heart; it was only the good hearts of those trapped there, assimilated into that which is not of the good heart, that made people believe that the good heart did exist behind the veil. Behind the veil, people were trapped into performing sameness models by the definitions they were taught through the alphabets that pushed them into religions, politics, movements, lifestyles, interests, etc, all of which had their own rules and regulations that their followers had to fit into to belong.

Even her environmental/freedom groups had their unspoken rules, values, language, image and lifestyle choices that those belonging had to fit into to be accepted. If they strayed too far from the mould, they were gently squeezed out, not maliciously but because they could not feel comfortable in that group any more. Just like the community she had visited, Elsa realised that behind the veil was full of its own strictly regulated communities, usually with some stronger leaders and other more passive followers, but all unable to connect and accept each other the way the plants and animals all accepted each other in nature.

Every aspect of behind the veil was a mirror image of the intentions behind it, just as nature was a mirror image of the intentions behind it. The sun shone freely without limitation and without charging for its warmth or restricting it to certain trees and animals. Its gift was given freely for all and the whole of life followed the example of the sun, each life form living its purpose and all of them contributing to the whole of life, each as important as the other from the highest mountain to the smallest bacteria.

Behind the veil, everything had a value and a worth, and abundance was granted to some but not others. There was nothing free behind the veil as the whole of behind the veil required the labour of men, women and children to appear to exist. Everything must be paid for, worked for and even the necessities of life, land, food, water and shelter that the rest of life had for free in nature, were hard won. Life was all about sending energy outwards, behind the veil was all about bringing as much as possible inwards, to the self.

So what was the answer? If everything behind the veil was causing harm in the form of the devastation and destruction of the natural world, as well as to the people trapped in it, then the solution had to be found outside behind the veil. Which meant no money, no manufacturing, no cars, no unnatural chemicals, no synthetic fibres, no processed food, no government, no law, no hospitals, no schools............... it was impossible to imagine.

If ownership was a problem, they would have to give up ownership, if the words and the intentions behind the words were a problem, they would have to become much more aware of how they used words, if consumerism was a problem, they would have to relearn all the skills for to grow and make what they needed and it would all need to be done as a local community because it would be too hard to do alone, or even as just a family. If you are a self sufficient family working hard to grow and make everything you need and one of the parents becomes sick or is injured, there is too much for the other parent to maintain. In a community, the extra duties can be shared out and the community can continue running smoothly. Likewise, a group of people bring a wide variety of skills that can be used for the benefit of the community as a whole.

No community could even begin to exist without behind the veil at first but they could start with the intention of gradually walking away as they practised their skills and, most importantly, practised releasing the emotional hold behind the veil had over them. Elsa knew that this would be the biggest obstacle; without ownership of land, people would have to trust each other enough to buy shared land, to put money and resources into the community for the common good and to be prepared to work hard without payment to build up infrastructure to the point where each family could have their own, simple home and garden to nurture while still putting energy into community gardens and infrastructure. The people take care of the community and the community takes care of the people.

Such a community could be a place of great joy, peace and freedom but it would not happen without selfless hard work, the willingness to accept others as they are and the commitment to see it through, even when they found it hard. Children could be brought up by nature, given the freedom to discover life for themselves without those around them filling their head with the concepts and constructs of life behind the veil until, through the generations, behind the veil becomes a distant memory of how not to do things.

Sitting on the bench in the sun, Elsa felt complete. She had gone into the wormhole and come out the other side with a clear view of what needed to happen. How long it would take and whether anyone would even want to do it, she had no idea, but she couldn't think of anything else to do. She sighed a deep sigh. The sun was setting, the birds were going to bed and the dog was waiting for dinner. Elsa stroked her head. "What do you think?" she asked her. The dog put her paw on Elsa's leg. "Dinner," said her eyes. Elsa laughed. "Yep, that's a good start," she said and she and the dog walked up to the house together.

Fiona Cristian

(c) Fiona Cristian
5th October 2024
Link: https://loveforlife.com.au/LFL32.html

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