"Everyone's equalized. See the look in their eyes." --Jawbreaker
                  "...all men are created equal..." --Preamble to the U.S. Constitution

                  All "men" are NOT created equal! That line from the preamble to the
                  United States Constitution is a fuck-up, what the poor dears meant
                  to say was that all men have equal rights. Too many times there have
                  been microcephaloids who have taken that to mean that all men have
                  equal abilities, often followed by a wistful fuzzythink of "if only all men
                  had equal opportunity, then they would all exhibit equal ability."
                  Wrong! There has been a philosophical war under way during most
                  of the 20th century between liberals and conservatives. The
                  conservatives maintained that breeding (race?) determined character
                  and ability, while the liberals said a person was solely the product of
                  their early environment.

                  Both are only partially correct and therefore both are basically wrong.
                  Environment does influence how a child develops, but the environment
                  can only work on what's already there. No touchie-feelie liberal money
                  pit of a Federal program is ever going to make silk sows out of any
                  pursed ears. The conservatives are partially correct in that a human
                  body is limited to the channels of expression hardwired into it at birth,
                  but they are doubly wrong because not only does environment play
                  a role in developing what potential's there at birth, but also because
                  there's much more to a human than mere genetic inheritance.

                  The missing factor is spiritual. A human being consists of an animal
                  body inhabited by two spirits. One of the spirits is of a lower type, an
                  animal mind. In your dog or cat this animal mind sits in the critter's
                  head and controls the body. Its attention is solely concerned with
                  bodies, their survival and evolution. A human has one of these animal
                  minds, but in a human it sits near the solar plexus. The second spirit is
                  YOU, and sits in or near (just outside) the human body's head. The
                  reason your animal-mind is at the solar plexus is because you took
                  over the body's controls at the head!
                  So what are you? Are you an animal?

                  Despite the fact that you're busy BEING an animal, you are not one.
                  What you are: is like a hole in space-time, that glows constantly with
                  energy and that has immense influence on everything it touches. To
                  put it in the terms used by the ancients: you are a (small gee) god.
                  Due to the influence of the middle-eastern (Judeo-Christian, Moslem)
                  religions on modern culture, this statement would need to be
                  rephrased for moderns: you are a piece of God, one of God's many
                  eyes.

                  "Yuck!!!" you might yell at the top of your lungs, "You used the G-word!"
                  I don't blame you one bit. The Judeo-Christian concept of God is
                  moronic, insulting and demoralizing (if God is everything and men are
                  nothing and the Lord is our shepherd, then are we nothing more than
                  domestic animals? Fuck that noise!). But I don't know how else to get
                  across the idea that each individual human body is operated by an
                  immortal spirit, who is one of a near-infinite number of such spirits,
                  each having the ability to directly affect its environment simply by
                  deciding what that environment will be like -- the sum total of which
                  decisions have formed the universe around us.

                  I suppose I should quote Bob Heinlein's attempt to say the same thing:
                  " 'God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends.' This
                  may not be true, but it sounds good -- and is no sillier than any other
                  theology." --R.A. Heinlein, from Time Enough For Love

                  Not bad. It does cover the phenomena that is observed directly by
                  anyone who is doing spiritual work. For instance, anyone who has
                  gone out-of-body knows absolutely that they're more than merely a
                  skin bag full of stinky chemicals. They also notice how easy it is to "be"
                  someone else, while maintaining their own consciousness throughout
                  the experience. I'm not going to give tons of examples on this because
                  it is a digression from the main thrust of this article: that all men are
                  NOT created equal. Notice that the previous line said "men". All
                  spirits of our type do seem to possess equal potential. But operating
                  within this treacherous universe has shaped and partially crippled all
                  of us. We no longer exhibit our full range of abilities, and what remains
                  to us varies widely from spirit to spirit.

                  One way to tell how able a spirit is, is to look at how much physical
                  space it occupies. Some spirits are little, crushed things while others
                  (most of us) occupy a little more space. Some spirits are huge. I would
                  caution anyone who ever encounters such to be careful not to annoy
                  it. Such a spirit is immensely dangerous. They're also quite rare in our
                  neighborhood, so not to worry unduly.

                  But we who wear human bodies vary greatly in our overall power.
                  Some people are relatively giants. Most are kind of puny. The
                  percentage of incarnated smaller spirits on Earth seem to have
                  increased as the human population increased. There are more bodies
                  to go around, so even the weakest ghosts are incarnating. Back in the
                  old days when the human population was small, more of the powerful
                  spirits would take newborn baby bodies and many lesser spirits
                  present would do without. Not anymore! The human population is
                  something like 6 billion. That's a lot of bodies, and many of their
                  owners are frankly pretty second rate.

                  You don't think so? Look around at all the low-lifeforms inhabiting our
                  cities, many of them are little better than animals themselves. And yet...
                  they often yearn for more than the sufficient food & shelter life they
                  live. Somewhere behind the facade of their human consciousnesses
                  still exists their real natures only to be barely glimpsed in an awareness
                  and appreciation of beauty (something an animal can't do). There is
                  far more to a human than the visible meat and bones, even with the
                  smaller beings...

                  Ouran