| | Disclaimer: this will be boring, read at your own risk
It isn't you, it is me. I am going to lay it all out the way it really was, and is, and just hope.
I was a fairly normal child, exuberant, awed by the world around me. My mother took me to a Baptist church. There I became very confused. The older kids and adults in the church did not behave at all according to what we were taught. The older kids were mean. The adults did not seem to sincerely believe what we were taught at all. The very goals of the church seemed to have nothing to do with what I was being taught in Bible class. It seems like every admonition of the Bible was flagrantly ignored. My father never went to church, but after my parents divorced, they church treated my mother very poorly and she was shunned. It all seemed very crazy to me, and I refused to go anymore after about age 11.
After that, I started having panic attacks, which were terrifying. I could even talk about them I would just go into a private room and run in circles trying to escape the inevitability of death. It was terrifying.
I lived in an all-white, lower middle class city in Texas. Christianity was the norm, and even Catholics were called devil-worshipers. Baptists were the most intolerant, and that was the predominant religion. I tried joining the Royal Ambassadors for Christ when I was a little older, it was supposed to be like the Boy Scouts. Instead, it was torment, verbal and physical assault, and a punch in the nuts any time one of the directors wasn't watching.
At this time I just because depressed, realizing that God and Bible were just fairy tales to be told on Sunday, and nobody believed a word of it. It was just there to make people feel better when someone died.
At about age 12 I started having panic attacks. I could not believe there was a God. I was just an animal trapped among my righteous tormentors, facing a hopeless utter extinction. I has spend a lot of time memorizing scriptures in Sunday School for ribbons. I was good at it. Now I started repeating back the Bible to my tormentors, and discovered that they had no idea of the content of the Bible, the message, and that they in fact did not care. It all meant nothing to them at all.
Depressed, I withdrew for a while, but after my parents divorced, my own mother turned the abuse she had aimed at my father against me, telling me I was worthless, and that I wasn't going to live off of her for the rest of my life, and that I would never be a man, and that the second I turned 18 she was going to kick me out. She said worse things that I will not repeat. Before that, she had always love me. I was utterly devastated. The pain was deep, and it erupted in anger. I began with my lifelong hypochondria, always fearing I have some deadly disease or condition.
I became quite a miscreant. I had been abused by my peers. I was being abused by my own mother. I was tormented by seeing God and religion as bullshit, leaving nothing else, just an animal existence and eventual death. I stole things. I was verbally cruel, and mocked my elders, whom I had no respect. I was full of hate, and destroyed property, and laughed at the pain of others. I was cold. I had other hoodlum buddies in a gang, but no friends. There as no talk of feeling. I never cried again after the age of 12. We fought, stole, harassed people, and destroyed things. But most of all, I was smart, and I was very cruel, so I would often dismantle the security of those I hated by trying to destroy their faith, logically, coldly, and cruelly.
The local police, who knew us well and hated us as we did them, were just waiting for us to finally turn 18, and when we did we ended up in legal trouble. At first, this was a big joke. We drank and did whatever drugs we wanted, and we bailed each other out. We got drunk and drove wildly. We stole things. Ah, but eventually they caught us, and made some more serious charges stick, and we ended up in jail, where some of my "friends" lied to let me take the blame for the worse stuff so they could get off. Suddenly, I didn't even have the scum friends I had accumulated over the years. I was alone, and shunned by all.
In jail, I found a book on Christianity, Buddhism, Muhammad-ism, and Hinduism. Hey, I had nothing better to do, so I read it. I dismissed the Christianity because of my personal experiences with it. Muhammad did not sound right to me at all, as it seemed to encourage the same kind of brutal and arrogant behavior I had found in Christians. Hinduism I flat could not comprehend. It seemed crazy. Only Buddhism worked for me. To the core of my being I could agree that desire was the cause of all suffering. It didn't offer heaven, which I didn't want for fearing Christian might be there. It offered actual freedom and peace.
The was in my early 20's, and with my background I had a long, long way to go. I was so conditioned to power and judgment and so amazingly conceptually bound that it took me long years, decades even, to get even the first glimpse that concepts are not real, and judgments are based on concepts, and that the desire for power is ultimately based on concepts. It took forever for me to see that the egoic concepts of the self are delusions, and will never, ever lead to anything I want. They are seductive lies. I was a very poor student. These things took decades to sink in.
That took care of my 30's, and by my 40's I was reading Krishnamurti very deeply ... only I was constantly frustrated at putting what he said into practice in my everyday life, with a job, wife, and children. It all seemed too detached from my actual life. Somewhere in there I kind of gave up on it and moved into biofeedback and neurofeedback, thinking maybe there wasn't any spiritual component to anything and that it could all be done mechanically. That failed. After a while I just gave it all up and played computer games.
Somewhere in there, my lifelong anxiety left me, and I stopped thinking every change in my health was impending death. I decide this cure had simply arrived just because of my age. I was nearing 50. I was feeling pretty good, not having had any anxiety for years, and then my wife decided she wanted out of our marriage. I looked around, and I had no friends. My father died that year. He was an atheist, but still the only one I could talk to in my family. At last I was really alone. The panic and anxiety was right back. This threw me into turmoil, and I finally found a non-duality group. It seemed to be a distillation of the only true things I had learned over my years of torment.
I am comfortable with the non-dualistic approach, but my mood is unstable and I don't ever have any lasting peace or bliss. Nor do I seem to have any insights that really change my life. For instance, I thought I was doing very well, but then I got an ear-ache and a swollen gland, and went right back into obsessing that I have cancer, just like 30 years ago.
I have done an amazing number of things, from talk therapies, drugs, hypnotism, biolfeedback, neurofeedback, meditations of all kinds. I have had all kinds of insights, from seeing the ego as a construct, from being completely immersed in the beauty of a rainstorm without a trace of self. Of course, maybe I am just crazy. I think I have had precognitions that were completely accurate, not just the bullshit kind where it was a likely possibility. I think I have seen ghosts, and quite clearly, though I wouldn't say I felt they were really there materially ... they seemed more like things out of time. Most of the time, I realize quite completely that my ego is utterly imaginary, and that egoic thoughs are harmful. I would very much like to say that the unbiased Witness that has always been here observing my life -- I would like to say that I know that is me. But I don't feel it. I still feel like my mind is me, and over and over I attack to my egoic thoughts and think I am that.
Over the years, I have felt like the entire world was illuminated with golden light. At times I have been in a world where everything was beautiful. At times I have been in horrible places of darkness and despair, but even then, my awareness was there, unwavering, still dispassionate, not judging, not trying to help or choose sides.
No one could be more tired of suffering, or more willing to let go of self, or will to free fall into the void. I do not have any fear of letting all this go. I am eager. I wish I could see the void so that I could jump in.
I have seen a lot of good people, and they are all encouraged by some of what I tell them. It is like I see things correctly in many way. But they don't seem to understand when I fall back into things I have already worked through. I seem to go back. Now I am back to being a hypochondriac, caught in fear, caught in "what it", afraid of being afraid, need to control an outcome -- resisting reality. Projecting a reality I don't want, which hasn't happened, and resisting that imaginary thing.
Clearly, I would seem to be simply crazy, or hopeless. I see no progress at all, and I don't have another 35 years to work on it.
Sorry to be a boring old man, but I have learned one thing, which is that wisdom can just as often fall from the young as well as the old.
Thanks,
John |