Humanity is light and you are a photon. Light is composed of individual discrete units—yet you are bathed in it. Like a photon is both a particle and a wave, a human is both an individual entity and a communal frequency. There isn’t a clear separation between the two, both are true at the same time, and both reveal themselves in different contexts.
Your specific frequency is tuned by culture and beamed into the world by community. You cannot escape the wave of your creation; the circumstances of your birth; but you illuminate the dark nonetheless. You are not just a tiny part of a vast universe; you are the very energy relied upon for observation.
Consciousness is the light that illuminates meaning. Why be hypercognizant of your place in the cosmos when the idea of the cosmos wouldn’t exist without you? You should perceive yourself as an individual with agency first, and a cog in the wheel of society second. Not doing so is dogmatism.
It is possible that this advice should have been reversed many many years ago when a person’s identity wasn’t in jeopardy. When it was self-obvious that your purpose in life was to serve a small community of likeminded people and that individuals who put themselves above the needs of the group were rightfully labeled as selfish.
But back in those days engineering was limited mostly to civil structures and military destruction. These days technology has grown far better at increasing our capacity for communication than it has at rearranging physical materials. Communication is the lodestone of community and what was once obvious—the importance of a well attended community—what was once self-limited via the quote unquote, tyranny of place—has now become bloated and misunderstood and abused by dopamine addiction machines. The shared Latin root of communication and community is “con”, meaning “together”. The Internet has done an incredible job at improving the quantity of communication among individuals but has largely failed to improve the quality*.
Further, if your energy level is too low, you will become easily refracted the moment you hit an object like a weak and unfocused beam of light. You will splinter into a thousand new streams of indeterminate quality and let the objects in your trajectory determine your color. You will let others determine your values**.
If you don’t determine your own values, someone else will determine them for you. Only the enlightened are truly empty vessels: the rest of us need to be filled. These values for me are life is pain, life is work, relationships are paramount, every law of government should maximize for individual liberty, America is great, weakness is not virtuous, technology improves lives, and there is no upper limit on human expansion. These are plainly and unapologetically influenced by my upbringing, but at least they’re communicated to be contended with.
The frequency of our collective is important but we can all agree that light is most beautiful when there are many frequencies to observe. A single frequency is focused, ugly, piercing. A band of spectrums appeals to the eye and the soul. Like a photon, your trajectory will inevitably be influenced by the gravity of the day, but at the end of it all, it’s your job to vibrate at the frequency that is most beautiful to you. For me, that’s green. Today I am still blue. But I hope I get there eventually.
* I’ll give Snapchat a nod in that they’re the only consumer application I can think of that actually succeeds in bringing people together.
** An individual adopts an identity to perform in a community.