That which is other is everywhere. If you take any object that becomes subject of your awareness, like a flower,or a tree, it automatically stands as the other, a foreign entity, with its own independent-of-you existence that is unique, and yet it still fascinates us. You may look at a flower and admire its beauty, its color, the shape or the spots on its petals. But it doesn’t care. It will never reciprocate your admiration, it will exist as it is, being itself, within its own existence.
Even we are foreign to us. We look at our hair or our blood cells under microscope and feel like we are looking at a completely alien world (even if we later tag it “property belonging to self”), and it feels foreign because it is perceived as the other. The more we look around us, or into us, the more we feel strangers to ourselves and all that is around us. Even our own mind and self becomes foreign, and other, when we begin to actually look at it and study it. It’s like a flashlight that shines on all and everything, but cannot shine on itself no matter how much it tries, a flashlight that is perpetually looking at “other” things. Some people say that they feel as if they are one with nature when they are surrounded by it, but lately it’s been completely opposite for me, it only makes me feel even more out of place. Every little single thing only points me to what it is, and with that, to what I am not, and eventually to what I am-out of place.
Pandora,
It is easy to get lost in the endless abstractions, to ask those questions that have no answers because they really aren’t questions in the first place.
For a bit of lightness: youtube.com/watch?v=ydAfgSIgU_E
Feel better? 
I am definitely out of place.
I am confident that I’ll find my place someday though … when I’m six-feet under.
No. Not really. But that puppet is pretty funny!
Have you tried meditation? At first, with tranquility meditation, you simply learn to relax more, which stabilizes the mind, and enhances its natural clarity and strength. Subsequently, perhaps after at least some months, you could undertake various meditative investigations. Classically, some of these include meditations summarized as “Recognizing that the mind and the sense impressions of phenomena are intertwined”, “Recognizing the inseperability of body and consciousness”, “The conjunction of mind, sensory organ, and sensory object”, “The nonduality of mental states and appearance”, etc. A major result of these kinds of meditations is to see things more accurately and to experience a more stable and expansive sense of well-being, both physical and mental.
The progression I described relates to Buddhist meditation, and even more specifically to Mahamudra meditation. Your OP seems to me directly related to these. They are extraordinary medicines for dis-ease. It is about “becoming whole” in a sense, and is not about creating even further schisms in our being, such as a “leap of faith” would create. It is simply learning to look with clarity and insight at your own life, and reality as it is.
Pandora the root of the plant is not the plant, the stem is not the plant, the flower is not the plant, the leaves are not the plant. Remove anyone of those though and you would not have the plant as it should be. Though different they compliment each other and need each other. If you are a part of this world then you are needed.
robert has left the building
-Imp
