Lately, I have been playing a computer game called Tomb Raider.  The main character is Lara Croft, the computerized version of Indiana Jones, investigating old temples and ruins, solving riddles, finding treasure, springing traps, and confronting enemies.

Lara packs an arsenal of guns in order to defend herself.  Her opponents vary from lions, bats, wolves, and panthers, to ugly, screeching, unknown flying beasts and hideous mummies and even the occasional vindictive human adventurer.  The game is programmed so that enemies keep attacking Lara until she is dead, and the "correct" response within this game framework is to kill them before they kill her.

I was enjoying this game but noticed that whenever I killed something, I felt sort of bad, wishing that they wouldn't attack me and that there was another way around the situation other than killing them.  In Lara's belief system (programming) she believes in confrontation and win/lose situations.  So in order for her to have what she wants, her opponents do NOT get what they want, which is to kill Lara.  Simply put, the game does not present a win/win scenario in the way we're used to thinking about it.

Now, we've all played many roles in our lives.  That is, accepting a certain boundary to the identity of the self that changes as we grow and can be different depending on the situation.  Unfortunately, many of us start to identify ourselves with these roles and we start to lose flexibility, not only with our belief systems, but with who we think we are.

Who are we beyond the roles that we play?  For that answer, we have to look to our essence, our unlimited self, to a self beyond form.  Any kind of "form" or expression in physical reality is merely the momentary translation of our energy into physical terms.  An obvious example is a person who identifies themselves with the kind of car they drive.  If something happens and the car isn't there any more, they experience a loss of themselves and usually look to the next form to latch onto in order to feel "okay" or "whole" again.

What's happening in many of our lives is that we're not only letting go of previous attachments, but we're not letting ourselves have a free moment to form any NEW attachments either.  When we try to grab onto something and fail, we eventually start to wake up and ask ourselves what the heck we're really looking for.  This goes for identification with any one kind of role or set of beliefs or way of being.

This moment of realization is an awakening to Self.  Where before we were so focused on our form, our role in physical reality, now we are looking beyond the limits of physical expression, to the limitless.

I've experienced challenges with participating in email list discussions on occasion for this very reason.  A message is sent to the list, and list subscribers who have nothing else but this message from you may identify YOU with the content of the message in front of them, and in that moment they may not remember that there's more than meets the eye.  This is the same as confusing the narrator or voice of a story with the WRITER.  The narrator may be someone completely different from the writer - the narrator is a perspective or role that the writer assumes during the time the story is being created.  This becomes a challenge because clear communication often requires an understanding of the framework or context in which the message was being written, or it can be easily misconstrued.  This is just one example of how our changing identification of self can be tricky these days.

When I was playing Tomb Raider, I felt bad about killing the wolves, etc. because I was confusing myself with Lara Croft.  Because *I* don't really believe in win/lose situations, I don't usually create them.  And I don't really believe in survival situations where killing is the ONLY answer, unlike Lara.  I was judging Lara's actions not by her framework of beliefs, but by my own.  I was feeling bad because I was applying what *I* would do, to *Lara's* actions and they didn't match.

In the same way that we play roles that we aren't wholly identified with, each and every MOMENT we experience in physical reality has its own set of beliefs, perspective, and "situational boundaries" that create it.  In the same way I wouldn't respond to a situation like Lara because of our differing belief systems, person A and person B will respond differently to any given situation as well.  No two situations, no matter how similar they SEEM, are exactly alike, and no two people are going to take action in the same way.  Nor is there any right answer to a situation.

"But that's morally ambiguous," you say!  Of COURSE it is.  Morals are  crystalized rules we place on ourselves and others because we don't yet know how to completely trust the creative, spontaneous selves and our own, dynamic sense of integrity.  Have we restricted our "humanity" to a set of morals that are based on one limited idea of what life and consciousness really ARE?

Am I then more "spiritually advanced" than Lara Croft because I would search for an alternative to killing should I find myself in a self-defense situation? Or isn't that just another way to further separate the self?  In that self-defense situation, would I be choosing another solution because that's where my impulses were guiding me, or would I want a different solution because I was reacting against and judging killing to be WRONG? My inner guidance tells me that NOTHING is every wrong, and that questions of right and wrong are mere by-products of believing in duality - how was I to apply this inner truth I felt to "killing"?   Although I can truthfully say that I have never felt the impulse to KILL anyone, I still had resistance around the idea of metaphysically "accepting" the concept of "killing".

I have to believe that with infinite probabilities, and zillions of lives lived in physical reality, there is a part of me that has killed, is killing, and will kill.  The challenge for me in THIS life, this instance, was to open to love and trust.  When I finally came to terms with this, I started to truly understand a perspective on killing beyond the duality of right and wrong.  I connected with this energy and realized that there are many enactments of one being "killing" another that I truly didn't feel were "wrong" at all.  I began to release the role or "form" I had identified myself with in this case... the form still exists, but I am seeing it simply as another valid expression of ATI.  Of course, this doesn't mean I'm going to run out and "kill, kill, kill" - it just means that I'm no longer putting energy into trying to suppress this particular expression of ATI - which means that my energy is now free in this area - free to focus on what I want to create instead of being distracted by resistance.  My energy is now free to support my visions of my world where "killing" isn't even an issue.

This shift in consciousness that we're experiencing is shaking EVERTHING up - no stone or judgment or limitation is being left unturned and unexamined.  "Killing" happens to be a topic that many of us are emotionally attached to in one way or another - we identify with one side of a duality and reject another.  And although KILLING SEEMS to somehow be more "important," resolving this duality within is the same, in essence, as resolving judgments against ANYTHING.  It's about wholeness within the self and expanding to a new level of awareness of life and consciousness.  When we resolve a duality, we are suddenly able to experience that larger picture of what creation, value fulfillment, and consciousness really ARE and will be following our joy in each moment, knowing ourselves beyond any form, and that being able to "kill" is as much an illusion as any supposed separations of self are.

In that moment, we will have freed ourselves from identifying with roles or with any expression in the moment, and will be able to move with flexibility and love and complete connection, within the larger framework of the Self.  That doesn't mean we won't play roles anymore, it must means we'll be flexible and allow the moment to unfold, with complete trust of our connection to ATI.

©1999, Kristen Fox. Printed in the October-November 1999 Issue of the online Conscious Creation Journal. http://www.consciouscreation.com/ (Feel free to duplicate this column for personal use - please include this copyright notice.)