by Reb and Lexa, 6/22/01

Some of us have personal wishes that we have a more 'spiritual' world, and some of us demand integration of that side with the current world outside.

Because it's just natural too isn't it? You have a plural group--that is a *group* of people. Some of them are going to have things happen to them and believe a certain way, and others are going to think differently. An entire group does *not* need to be held down to subscription to a single belief system.

For example, yes, things happen to some of us sometimes. I break computers when I get really frustrated, for no good reason at all--that's a common trait in just about *anyone*, and it shows up in singlets as often as plurals, doesn't it? We firmly believe that the world treats Kyth more nicely and gives him better breaks, although it makes up for it with the occasional severe jerk or three. If you ask Kyth, he'll deny that.

If you ask half of us if we believe in things, we'll agree that we've had strange dreams that have come true, or wierd experiences, or the like. The rest of us are skeptics. So what are we? Does one side contaminate the other? Apparently, according to how people want to percieve multiples, yes.

Another of us, Jonah, believes that he has a 'personal relationship with God'--no, not the delusional messianic complex, but the same one that the average Christian occasionally mentions wanting to have or having.

For them to say that, it is faith. For us to say that, it is easy proof that we are insane.

Just because people are housed in a group does not mean that that group itself is the source or cause or should take the blame for it. This is a lot like how some people will look at plurals and use the range of different people with different problems as 'proof' of how 'dysfunctional' plurality itself is.

But, *dammit*, what would you expect from five or six or thirty or a hundred people locked in a proverbial room together? It would be *unnatural* if the sum total of everyone came up with only a single person's traits and problems, not a signal of them being healthy. The average human being is not exactly that well put together, and yet the world expects multiples, if they want to even attempt to claim rights to sanity, to be in each and every person incredibly well-balanced and bland. Any problems that a single person has in a system can't be from natural human (or other) issues-- it *must* be because they're plural, musn't it?

Like how I'm a lesbian not because I happen to be that way. It must be because I endured some form of wanting to reject my male parent. Or just maybe because women have all those great curves.

People who are not plural can and *do* wander around with rich inner worlds. Look at guided meditation or trances--the experiences don't always have to be linked with plurality itself. They may happen only to certain individuals or groups within a household. Just like plurality can be translated to a slice of a city populace jammed into the idea of a single physical body, you'll have variation in people. It may not have anything to do with the proximity to each other, and it--or the lack of--doesn't have to be caused by having to live upstairs from a family of five or five hundred.

People in and out of plural groups *are* people. That means that there is just as much a chance of a person following a practice as not, believing in other worlds as not, considering the idea that they can lay on hands or turn on TVs by thinking hard enough. For all these people, they should be allowed to be treated as having their own standards of life and belief--shouldn't they? Shouldn't we, as plurals, not have to worry about if we'll be looked at and assumed that all of us in this group are Powerful Wonky Spirits--some of us are just plain human? Shouldn't we also, as plurals, also be able to hold onto our own sets of hopes and faiths and not have to be assumed that other people in our group will be blamed for what we as individuals keep to--that society might be able to understand that for every believer, there is a skeptic too?