I started imagining one of those cake-decorating bags filled with icing. The kind with a small metal tip at the end. You squeeze the bag and out comes a thin line—maybe a flower, maybe a swirl, maybe someone’s name written across the cake.
The bag itself could be called the ego—a whole container full of possibilities. And the little tip at the end is the particular mask that comes out in any given moment.
Teacher. Friend. Grandfather. Driver of a car. Person making breakfast.
The bag contains them all, but only one comes through the tip at a time.
Sometimes we even prepare the mask ahead of time.
At night before going to sleep, I might lay out my clothes for the morning. Put the papers I need into a briefcase. Make a sandwich if I’m taking food with me. Maybe even sketch out the next day’s schedule.
It’s like cooking. Sometimes before starting a recipe I set all the ingredients out in little bowls—salt here, onions there, spices measured and waiting. Then when the cooking begins, everything is ready to flow together.
Many of those packaged “cook-your-own” meals work the same way. The company has already sorted the ingredients into little envelopes and containers. They just tell you the order to combine them.
In a sense we do that with our personalities.
We prepare the mask that says: I’m ready. It’s a new day. Let’s go.
Earlier I had been thinking about another triangle—intelligence, memory, and emotion.
Intelligence is like the car itself.
Memory is the steering wheel.
Emotion is the gas pedal.
A car without steering doesn’t know where to go. A car without gas doesn’t move. And steering and power without a vehicle would have nothing to guide.
The three work together.
Or like a can of paint and a brush. The paint contains the color, but the brush gives it form. Intelligence guides the hand that decides what will appear on the canvas.
All of this moves along a spectrum.
On one end we might call it spirit.
On the other end, manifestation—the world of forms, personalities, and masks.
Then I remembered something I once read about the Lone Ranger—The Lone Ranger.
In that story he realizes that the mask he wears has become so much a part of him that he hasn’t taken it off for years. The mask, the silver bullets, the saddle, even his horse Silver—Silver—all of it had become the identity.
So he begins letting it go.
First the bullets.
Then the saddle.
Then even Silver.
One by one the pieces fall away until finally the mask itself can come off.
When I read that, it didn’t feel like loss. It felt more like an opening.
Letting go of the bundle of thoughts, emotions, and memories that hold “Michael” together.
And with that comes another recognition: letting go also touches everyone connected to that bundle—parents, relatives, friends, pets. All the love, all the grief, all the memories.
There is sadness in that.
But also freedom.
Because the love itself doesn’t disappear. The feelings, the memories, the impressions—they remain somewhere in the fabric of things.
Almost as if memory itself has a kind of physical presence.
As if the boundary between spirit and manifestation isn’t a hard wall but more like a seam where the two are stitched together.
The cloud and the individual computer.
The mask of connection and the mask of separation.
Both emerging from the same bag of icing, each appearing for a while through the little tip, decorating the surface of the moment.
Spiritual Gravity 