Please step forward. Move up to the line painted on the floor, and wait for instructions.

You are bestowed existence. You have two legs and two arms and one head. This may be obvious, but I don’t want you to forget it or take it for granted. Here are your tools. Your skin is impregnated with millions of nerve endings.

Each can trigger pain or pleasure. Your eyes behold the actual form of things in inexhaustible detail. Your nose discerns what things emit: what they want or wish to be, or are. Your ears perceive the rumbling that originates in the inside.

You have been equipped with several powerful instincts; for example, a strong attractive force that draws you to others; and a repulsive one that contracts to your own self. A fount of needs springs up perpetually. Some of them I’m telling you, and some of them I’m not telling you. When you are sleeping or lost, these will guide you: drifting along the semi-conscious course of your life, you need only follow the current. But you need not; the course you choose is in your own hands.

Certain skills and weaknesses have been applied to you. Certain appetites and aversions have been fastened to you. You are shy or bold, gentle or passionate, methodical or impulsive. You can be bitter or magnanimous. You can rage, wound, and betray. Or you can nourish heal, and create. None of these are fixed: form your persona.

Choose your method. Go off on a quest, or stay home. Seek glory, or bliss, or comfort. Get money, pleasure, or companionship. Whatever you gain, you will lose. Your bodies are rugged, but they will not last forever. You will die, but you can try to perpetuate your existence: build a monument, plant a seed, raise a child.

Reject or embrace life. If you delay, tendrils of regret will propagate, and a single feeling or thought could sweep you down. Or enter the stream of events: select a route and sail ahead. Savor and luxuriate in any complete engagement: the movement of body; the range of emotions; the use of the mind. Sensuality washes over and bathes existence. The cascade of desire, the satisfaction of need, the impulse of creation: meaning is omni-centric, and bursts into being everywhere.

You may be one of the lucky ones, and quickly reach your destination. Or you may be condemned to perplexity. No matter how relentlessly you struggle, you will never make any forward progress, and you will not get what you want. In that case, you will have to practice the alchemy of happiness. The journey itself will be your destination.

Feel free to go wherever you like. As long as you inhabit the earth, think, say, make, and do anything. There are no prior or artificial limitations set on this. Choice is your habitat. You can’t avoid choosing, because in that case the default setting will be applied. There are no prior restrictions, but there are consequences. The actual meaning will be determined afterwards. If you cause harm, harm will multiply. If you do good, good will multiply.

Unique to your own self is a chunk has been given to you and taken from you. The phantom of this missing chunk will be your shadow. Except in catastrophic situations, you may never actually know it. This is the redeeming quality of terrible moments: you will awaken and remember.

The earth flies in circles around the sun, held in the cradle of infinite space. Molecules interlock and electrons spin. Light flies at extreme speeds, but pauses to illuminate the object of your sight. Everything is complementary. The laws of nature are vouchsafed during the term of your lifetime.

Water will rush downhill. Seeds will sprout. Oxygen will vivify you. Nature is your domicile. Deserts speak the language of your solitude. Mountains stand watch over ages. All that is needed and more is provided in abundance.

You are entering dimensionality. Time and space are inverse measures of the force of the soul. The multiplicity of existence is deceptive. A million moments stand in a line, taking their place and then falling away. Each is an image of the universe as you conceive it at that time. Pay careful attention as you slip on bodies: try not to forget what has been obvious up until this moment. Later on reconstructing the actuality will be arduous.

Take your bodies: intertwine and commingle with them. You are an infusion of coarse and subtle elements. Every article is steeped in the sap of veracity. At the root your founding principles are cast. If you should betray these principles the mold in which you were formed will crack.

You stand at the junction of materiality and eternity. Alternate currents are rushing by. At this confluence the primary question forms. Here, with this fragile, beautiful container, you balance and assess the all.

Prepare for pleasure, pain. Prepare for love, loss. Prepare for drama, trauma.

Enter time. Form your persona. Select a route.

Wait for the gong to sound. On you marks, get set. Now go.