To Possess.

What makes the human species different from the rest of the animals? A question asked throughout our history and never really popularly answered. It's a question that's vexed me from the first time I held a fire ant in my palms. Are we different, or do we want to be to make it easier to reconcile our restless minds?

Possession, my friends. Ownership. Follow me on this.

We were the first species to mentally make the leap from "This is mine." to "What are the limits of what is mine?" We created boundaries. From boundaries came territory. From territory came the mental gymnastics of words, for what are words but sonic division lines? To say, "This space, this mammoth, this bone is mine." creates boundaries of what constitutes a mammoth, a bone, a space. Words define, and yet words are imperfect, for many unimaginable things exist between, among, spliced, across the word.

Temporal acknowledgment only abetted our aberration. Words created past, present, future. Only present really exists, but our triumph of time invented the past and future. With time came better and worse, with better and worse came leaders and followers. We became so trapped within our language that we forgot it was but a tool to serve our life. Instead, we allow language to dominate. It can be seen in every utterance I type. And such beget suffering. We assume that a bottle holds liquid, that a body is not a collection of working cells but itself a cohesive whole; we assume there is a difference between body and soul only because we are raised by our species to accept boundaries. The "soul" lies in our head only because we accept most of our information visually and the eyes connect directly through our brain. Imagine what language we would speak if we our primary sense was touch! But as the brain processes most information, we assume that's where the soul resides.

I will not even go into the ancient belief that the heart holds love.

The majority of our bodies is constructed with either cells with alien mitochondria or bacteria. The DNA that we assume consumes our cells is in the minority. We keep on trying to find our self, but the very notion of self is outdated by biology and cosmology. Our brain cells do not replace themselves, yet our bodies, even on a cellular level, are different and distant from how we were born. The pictures we see of our youth are of alien beings, entirely not what we know except by appearance. Yet we consider ourselves I.