When we testify, we become.

To testify: to give evidence as a witness. 

When we testify, we not only stake a claim in experience and sensation, we claim existence.

When we testify, we become.

What we see and hear and taste and smell and feel has been made real through our testimony as a witness to this world. And in doing so, we've been made real, we've made ourselves real.

To testify, we have to voice our experience. We have to translate what we've witnessed. And to do so, we have to put those experiences into words. We have to become those words. So which comes first: voice or words?

At what point does thought and awareness become testimony? Could this be the sixth sense? This ability to testify to our existence and reality by translating our interactions with the world? To combine the sensational data we collect from our five senses experiencing the physical world and witness, then see ourselves witnessing; to hear the world and then hear ourselves thinking, to touch and then feel ourselves feeling, to smell and taste and then say, declare to the world that these sensations are real, they happened, and we're proof: the fact that we've testified makes them real.

We've experienced and imagined and translated and understood and shared, and in doing so the world has become real, we've become real, and we've defined our voice, and we've influenced the same chain of reactions occurring in the people all around us.

If we were to close ourselves off from the testimony of others, wouldn't we also lose our ability to testify, to witness, to claim our existence and become what we are, and declare it to the world?

Do we not lose ourselves when we are not witnessing others’ lives and collecting evidence of their existence and bearing witness to them becoming and translating and finding their voices?

If we refuse to bear witness to each other, then we lose our ability to testify. We no longer see or hear or smell or feel or taste, we no longer become, we no longer are or will, we only were.