Adam Blatner

Not that this is true, you understand, but it seems to me less weird than most other theories of how it works. The concept of aggregate soul in each new incarnation has a number of advantages and fewer flagrant disadvantages: The center of consciousness is multiple, shifting, and a composite of some fifty or so soul fragments. It’s not as if “you” come from a single “you” in a past life, for the reason that you are yourself not one you. You are an aggregate jostling. It all happens so that like a moving picture seems to be one continuous picture, but actually is—what?—24 frames a second?—so too you are an aggregate of many roles. Most of them are half functional, half-asleep, mushy, but in the aggregate with the more awake role, you get the illusion that you are coherent. It would be disturbing to your scheme of the way you ought to be to think otherwise.

The picture above represents the aggregate of roles that I suspect have merged into the illusion of “me.” Some are ordinary fellows, a number are non-human elf-beings—those with pointy ears—, some animals, monsters, extra-terrestrials—, and perhaps I have an over-representation of the elfin or troll-ish. I suspect that much of me in this lifetime has been more human roles, even those that are quite rational, professional, even. Now that I’m retired I find that it is revealed to me that I might “come out” more in other roles.

This is not easy, for society is suspicious of those who are not entirely “real” as experienced or defined in their own terms. But we must remember that humans are fiercely ethnocentric, not really recognizing other tribes as people-who-one-must-not-kill-or-eat only fairly recently. Granting a level of respect to women, children, other races, religions, or other anomalies of any kind is a most recent phenomena. I want to encourage humans to consider (as they have just begun to do) to grant respect to other types of consciousness—animals, extra-terrestrials, elves, fairies, sprites, trolls, etc. It’s gonna happen, but when. I am hoping to deconstruct the illusion of one self in the mode of the dominant species or folks call you crazy or at the very least, weird.

But I suspect a goodly number of people who have more than 13% elf or fairy half know it, but can’t admit it to themselves. They are a bit more imaginative than most, a bit more inclined to a wry form of humor. Since it gets mixed with more human characteristics, it can be repressed and also blended with being “ordinary.”  So this is just to get the ball rolling towards opening to the actuality that many of us are partly inclined to express a bit of the not-altogether real in the cultural sense of what real involves. It’s just another step in the widening circle of caring.