We live among you, but we are not human. We are also daughters and sons of the first Adam, fearfully and wonderfully created in the image of the Most High; but we do not fit the narrow definition of “human” that you have developed. Human. Homo Sapien. Man who thinks. By this you set yourself apart from other primates and man-like creatures, real or imagined: you think, they do not. But we do not think, not like you; we are excluded by your very definitions, and we have long since accepted that. We have dwelt beside you since the beginning, though we are only a few thousand to your billions. We hide ourselves with various masks to avoid your fear and disdain. When you do notice us, you usually classify us among the divergents of your own kind: those few million whom you call empaths, autistics, geniuses, and other such names denoting their strangeness. These labels describe our acolytes: hybrids who can perceive our realm while being anchored to yours; they are not us (though we love them deeply, and help them cope with the dichotomies of their existence when we can). But we are not bound by your labels; they are not our true name. We are Homo Viator, Man who travels: for we traverse the universe through the roots and branches of the Tree of Life along pathways you cannot perceive or comprehend, and our existence is shaped by this pilgrimage.
The created universe is a great Tree, in which the entirety of the cosmos is connected by immaterial strands which cannot be explained by your Sapien rationalism or mysticism. In the depths of your soul, you know this. Your science and religions acknowledge that this must be true, but most of you banish the “spooky action at a distance,” to the edges of your awareness lest the transcendent reality of it destroy the comfortable fiction of a universe bounded by your linear and segmented Sapien conceptions. You have unconsciously constructed your reality in your own image, and live within this constructed reality as gods, relegating everything that does not conform to your assumptions and frames of reference to non-existence. All your creations are built on your segmented and linear thinking: language, philosophy, architecture, and culture. Our acolytes among you see past your limited world, and perceive, to one extent or another, the paths that transcend your structures; and because of this you call them sages, deranged, impaired, or savants: thereby banishing their observations to the periphery of Sapien society. Viators exist in the world beyond your conceptions. We are the birds that nest and fly within the Tree, traveling by compulsion down its near infinite roots and branches and at once feeling all that is connected to it in our nonlinear and interconnected way. Like you, we frame our existence around our own assumptions: nonlinear interconnectivity undergirds our conception of reality. We must travel the Tree, feeling its connection to the one, the all, singing our strange songs amidst the Tree, and adding our otherworldly harmonies to the great eternal hymn to the praise of his glory.
Relations between our two peoples have always been paradoxical. We love you, and hate you. We love you because we understand you and your species more deeply by seeing your connection to the universe; such deep understanding always breeds a deep love. We hate you because we cannot think like you and therefore cannot understand you; such profound alienation leads to profound hate. We can never reach homeostasis within any of your constructed realities or bounded roles: our minds simply were not built to stay on one thing, one idea, one little fragment of existence. From your perspective, we can be anything: saint or psychopath, lord or landless, hero or villain. To us, all your labels merely describe one intersection point between your world and ours and no more define us than your physical address at any given moment defines you. Like you, we grow and change in our self-actualization; but not by the laws of your world. Rather, we travel farther, faster, deeper, and higher, according to our individual design. Sometimes we ride the connections so far and so fast that we lose ourselves and our grip on your reality; we are not anchored in the bounded universe as you are. Though it is dangerous, this is how we grow and be; this is how we become what He made us. And traversing these connections to the ends of the universe, we find Him always there, in all the places we go.
Are we human? Certainly not by Sapien definitions. But though we are only a small minority, we contest your right to define the species; only the Creator has that authority. And by the eternal will of the great Jehovah, the standard and definition of what it means to be human has been eternally settled: it is the God-Man, Christ Jesus. The Eternal Son, very God of very God, while remaining what he always was, became what he was not by assuming a complete human nature and uniting it to himself in his single person, unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, and inseparably. His multifaceted humanity, not your chauvinistic definitions, defines the scope of what it means to be human. We are not like you, we do not aspire to be like you; we are twice created in His image, and aspire to be like Him. Sapien or Viator, we are all complete in him, and we seek, by his grace, to be made into his image; each after our own fashion. Our species were created together in Adam, and redeemed together in the Second Adam. Our paths are divergent, but complimentary; though we rarely understand how or why in this world. But the day will come when our two species will be one, on that great day when all things in heaven and earth are united in him who is our Head, even Christ. We must travel in our peculiar way, while you think in yours; but someday our paths will converge at He who is the center of all things: the one who dwells at the center of our Tree and at the pinnacle of your thoughts. For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
